Thank you all for the prayers. Vaccines, apparently, don't stop transmission. I've had two. But severity is obviously reduced. So far.
Good to hear. I know several who were hit with omicron. Usually 1-2 bad days then big improvement. Despite our son getting it, no one else in our home (yet). The wife and I may be in the sweet apot for the booster effectiveness. I
As someone who had it before being vaccinated, and after... the vaccine made a significant difference.
Perhaps, although the number of vaccinated people who still get it does cast doubts on just how effective the vaccine is. If it doesn't stop you getting the disease and doesn't stop you spreading the disease it doesn't really seem to be much of a vaccine. It's certainly hard to see why it's so important that the unvaccinated need to be subjected to ever-more societal exclusion when the best the vaccine seems to do is offer some benefit to the individual taking it. Curiously the people I know who are not vaccinated but were exposed to the virus before the vaccines were available haven't suffered any respiratory illnesses at all since fighting off this virus. Even people who are going about their lives as normal haven't even caught a cold. It's remarkable. You'd almost be forgiven for thinking that natural immunity was effective in some way.
Hard to imagine what will happen once a fully vaccine-resistant strain emerges by this spring. The vaccine gap (3 billion globally) has remained too large to adequately contain the pandemic. (IMO).
I must admit I'm leaning towards the notion that omicron is more likely to have originated within a vaccinated person than an unvaccinated, simply because if someone has vaccine-induced immunity any mutations in the virus can be "tested" against the vaccine more or less immediately.
No vaccine is 100% effective though (hence boosters). Some are really great (polio), some are great (measles, mumps, rubella) and others not so much (pertussis, pneumococcal). It depends on the vaccine, the illness, and so on. If it means the severity of symptoms is lessened, that's a win, too, even if you still get it. (I don't think there's going to be a vaccine immune COVID in the spring. Omicron already beat Delta by being less severe and more spreadable, and I imagine that's the trend COVID will continue.)
No vaccine is 100% effective but the covid vaccine seems to be one of the least useful I've ever seen, which is curious given the way there's ever-more pressure for everybody to get it. It offers some benefit to the person taking it and virtually no benefit to society at large, as far as I can see. Which means it's great if you'd rather trade the risk of a virus for the risk of a vaccine, although even then the near 100% survival rate for the majority of people renders the virus of questionable benefit anyway. I'm inclined to agree that omicron is likely to mark the point we learn to live with the virus. I just think that a vaccine-proof mutation, if it does ever appear, is more likely to have originated in a vaccinated person than an unvaccinated person.
A "pan-coronavirus" vaccine such as that being developed and recently completing phase one testing by the Army shows promise and could feasably stop all strains of coronavirus without boosters or seasonal adaptations. 2 more phases of essential testing put availability a ways off. There are others under develooment https://www.cnet.com/health/no-more...virus-vaccine-could-wipe-out-covid-pandemics/
There's a push to get it because it does help with hospitalisations, severity of symptoms, and so on. Survivability is one thing, but if COVID means - hypothetically - that 8 out of 10 people who contract the virus are hospitalised for three weeks, then we're suddenly talking about something other than pure survivability. If, as we're told, the vaccine cuts down on hospitalisations such that vaccinated people who catch COVID can get away with little more than cold-like symptoms, then socially that seems worth it. Plenty of people survive until someone you know wins a Hermain Cain award (reddit.com/t/herman_cain/). Unless, you know, there's a big push because there's more to COVID concerning that odd furin cleavage site that we're told, in relation to its conspiratorial-oh-nevermind-its-not-a-conspiracy origins. Mostly I'm tired of my family's ridiculousness when it comes to COVID, the end times, God's blessing on X or Y group standing up against the government, and on, and on.
A lot has transpired. My friend. Mark, a driller/blaster and much younger than me, will not return to work because of lung damage. He needs a concentrator to keep blood-oxygen levels up. So many long-term effects.
Sure, it certainly seems to offer some benefit to the person taking it. Whether that benefit is greater or lesser than natural immunity from surviving the virus remains unclear - some studies suggest natural immunity is anything up to 25 times more effective than the vaccine, others suggest the vaccine paired with natural immunity can sometimes create a kind of "super-immunity" even if the reasons why aren't entirely clear. Why unvaccinated people are expected to be excluded from places like restaurants and theaters remains unclear. Do other patrons only want to contract the virus from vaccinated people or something? If it were as drastic as 8/10 people going to hospital I don't think there would be any need for mandates at all - there would be a clear benefit to people that would, in the overwhelming majority of cases, warrant the very small risk of adverse side effects. Instead it seems we have a very small chance of requiring hospital treatment compared to a very small chance of adverse side effects. I recently read an article that said the most crucial thing we need to get through a pandemic - any pandemic - is trust. Trust in the people who are asking us to accept some restrictions in order to fight the pandemic. Sadly so many of our so-called leaders have squandered any trust they once had and frankly most of them aren't deserving of trust. Things originally dismissed as misinformation and heavily censored are proving to be true, such that now if our so-called leaders describe something as misinformation it seems there's a good chance it will turn out to be true in a few months. I'm tired of silliness all around. Take the vaccine if you want it, don't take it if you don't want it. Wear a mask if you want to, don't wear it if you don't want to. Make your own risk assessments and let others make theirs.
As an aside (I'll reply to the above in a bit): Archive 81 is a fantastic watch... so far. Two episodes in.
I'm working on my wokeness. Let me see if I can speak semi-fluid wokenian. Ahem.... "Dude, you must be a racist/bigot/homophobe/mysoginist/nativist/terrorist/white supremacist/climatechangedenier/antiscience/antivax/selfish/nonloveofJesusChristian/against the greater good/ dog faced pony solider." Sadly, our body politic and our social rhetoric has devolved to such nonsense that coherent discourse is not even possible any longer.