You‘re missing one important point. A pandemic is a global problem. Immunising one country will satisfy the population for a few months, but gives the virus a chance to mutate in another part of the world and reinfect your previously immunized nation.
The only efficient strategy is to immunize the globe simultaneously in the span of a few months. In the long term, nationalist leaders do more harm than good to their nation
Its not impossible. Biontech & pfizer can produce 1 billion doses alone this year, and they are only one of many companies that now have an efficient vaccine.
If you want to prevent mutations that endanger the whole effort you have to slow down spread evenly. This doesnt work if you completely stop the spread locally (ie in one country), while it speeds up everywhere else.
Why do you think the nationalist approach is efficient?
I don't think the nationalist approach is efficient. I just think that if you're within a nation, you definitely get your vaccine quicker than the other nations if your nation is doing the nationalist game properly. The article is really about the efficacy of nationalism in the "nation game."
This is prisoners dilemma stuff, or tragedy of the commons stuff. You have established a winning condition of "globe eradicates covid." The nationalist countries have established a winning condition of "get covid out of our country." This variation of winning conditions is what kinks the game.
And you are an individual. If your goal as an individual is global eradication of covid then you want one policy. If you as an individual want to not catch covid, you want a very different policy.
But thats exactly the point that you are missing. Getting a vaccine early that stops being effective leading to new dangers to personal health + economic damage because of new lockdowns isn‘t what citizens of these nations want either. No one is winning with that approach, its embarassingly shortsighted. You don‘t sound like the type of person that wouldn‘t see that
I don't buy it, quite honestly. I think less virus leads to less mutation, and I'm not convinced that it matters geographically where the "less virus" happens first. Purely mathematically speaking.
Then why would you vaccinate areas of a nation that don‘t have much virus going on first, when there are other hotspots around the world that are more pressing?
Look at what’s happening in India right now, a large country where a new variant emerged that can partially escape the protection from the vaccine. This could’ve been avoidable, had the US exported more of its stockpile (keep in mind that millions of the AZ shot are stockpiled in the US and will probably not even be used once since they aren’t FDA approved). Worst case scenario is that these variants start a new pandemic and the whole vaccination campaign has to start for everyone once again. And this pandemic taught us that the worst case scenario often is one of the more likely scenarios. I know you want this to be about politics or ideologies, but this is about science.
Small problem: The vax rollout plans where made under Bush and Obama admins, not Trump.
Our first exercises for this sort of event where during the Bush era anthrax scares and while those mostly went poorly the Obama-era (post-Katrina) emergency management reforms brought a lot more detail to the exercises and pre-planning. When COVID hit the plans where dusted off and implemented, if rather ineptly and slowly due to leadership failures at the top. What you are seeing the in the US is not the effect of electing a nationalist government. You are seeing the effects of decades of preparation and planning done by professionals. Israel and the UK have similarly effective systems.
European emergency management is an absolute mess.
Maybe the infrastructure, but Trump DID sign an executive order in December insuring Americans get first dibs on any vaccines made on American soil. Without that, who knows what our vaccinations would look like right now.
They would look virtually identical as vaccine priority was decided all the way back about halfway through Bushs' 2nd term. All the EO did was formalize 15 year old policy.
> In the game of nations, do you actually want things to be fair, or do you want your vaccine first?
I would argue that's a false dichotomy. Vaccines aren't something that exists in nature, they only exist because people go to a lot of trouble to make them. So it's entirely fair that these people and countries get first dibs.
This is a semantic argument revolving around the term "fair." I was using David Keating's definition for the article, which is different than your definition. I perhaps should have put the word "fair" in quotes to make that clearer.
Who cares? The REAL issue is these 'vaccines' are not really vaccines. They are experimental drugs that have not been tested. More importantly, while the new Covid vaccines will make billions of dollars for the big pharmaceutical companies, but here’s what they won’t do:
The vaccines will not cure Covid
The vaccines will not prevent people from contracting Covid
The vaccines will not prevent Covid-related hospitalizations
The vaccines will not prevent Covid-caused deaths
So.....are you thinking the same thing I am? Why bother subjecting yourself to an experimental drug that has not been tested, does not do what you think it is supposed to do and, of course, the manufacturers have legal immunity from any responsibility.
"Not really vaccines." Well, they look like vaccines, they get used like vaccines, and the evidence all suggests that they work like vaccines and that they do in fact massively reduce Covid infections and so on.
I guess what I'm saying is that all the evidence at hand indicates that you're talking nonsense.
"So.....are you thinking the same thing I am?"
If you're thinking that you're being fed nonsense bullshit by QAnon and friends, then yes. Otherwise probably no.
For the record, QAnon and RussiaGate is all BS. I do not subscribe to either. All I am asking is that you exercise critical thought and do not believe all the BS shoveled your way by the media. Check these out...
My point is these are not vaccines in any traditional sense of the word - they contain no inert virus, they don't confer immunity, they don't prevent contagion.
They are vaccines in the pratical sense of the word; you get one, your resistance to Covid goes up significantly.
As for "they don't prevent contagion"; well, that appears to be in contradiction to the evidence.
If your personal definition of vaccine includes "contains the actual virus", good for you. It seems that the rest of the world is using a different dictionary, so perhaps you should inform people beforehand that you're using a different language to them.
You take a bunch of people, and split them into fair groups. You give some the vaccine, some not. You wait. If the ones who got the vaccine contract Covid at a much lower rate than those who didn't, looking good.
The fascinating thing about the mRNA tech is that it end-arounds one of the greatest frustrations driving the anti-vax community. Yes, these may in fact not be vaccines depending on how you define vaccines. But lo and behold, that may mean that the anti-vaxers are more okay with taking them.
I don't take the flu vaccine, mostly because it fucks me up very badly. I was highly against taking the Covid vaccines until I started to read up on this new technology. It's actually pretty darn cool. Untested and possibly with long term side effects we don't know, including a small chance of getting microchipped by Bill Gates and turned into a Windows Operating System Zombie, but still pretty darn cool. I think I'm going to get it. Just at the end, in May, when the lines are empty.
I am less certain of your claims than you are, although HWFO media analysis would seem to indicate that the importance of vaccines is somewhat, if not largely, overstated.
I intend to stand in the back and let everyone else go first, which would be better for the herd regardless, and then see exactly when we hit HIT. Back in February I projected end of May, and I think that projection still looks pretty solid.
Look at this quote from Moderna's SEC filing, wherein they aren't allowed to lie or misstate what they are actually developing:
“Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA… We are creating a new category of transformative medicines based on messenger RNA, or mRNA, to improve the lives of patients. From the beginning, we designed our strategy and operations to realize the full potential value and impact of mRNA over a long time horizon across a broad array of human diseases.”
Your argument appears to be the mRNA isn't a vaccine because the SEC filing doesn't use the word "vaccine". But that's silly because arguing about the definitions of a word has no ability to affect nature.
The mRNA (if it works) gets translated in proteins, which go on the surface of a cell, which get recognised by the immune system as foreign (i.e. an antigen), the antigen is remembered by a memory cell, so that if it appears again, the immune system can mount a quicker response to it, so you don't get ill.
I call this a "vaccine". If you want to use a different word, that doesn't affect how it works and what it does.
You call it a vaccine....but it really is not. It is an experimental thing...like a new category of something. It really is gene therapy. Read that statement in the SEC filing as many times as you like. Does it not concern you that it is being distributed without the usual FDA approval, under emergency use permission, and is falsely being called a vaccine? It isn't. It is gene therapy with zero long term safety studies, including zero understanding of long term impact on the immune system. Of course, vaccine sounds way more palatable than "experimental gene therapy with no long term safety studies." Could it be that big pharma is banking on the bet that you won't be able to figure out the difference between a vaccine and something that is not? The way I look at it, the general population is going to be a guinea pig for an experimental gene therapy, not getting a vaccine like the flu shot. Hand wave and filibuster all you like, but that is what it is, per the manufacturer.
> Does it not concern you that it is being distributed without the usual FDA approval, under emergency use permission, and is falsely being called a vaccine?
IDGAF whether they call it a vaccine or not. They can call it a Gigantic Throbbing Humongous Erection for all I care.
> including zero understanding of long term impact on the immune system
And how exactly are we going to find out the long term impact for a treatment of a *novel* disease?
What would you do, say "it's a new disease, so we can't do anything"?
Yeah...for most people we do not need to do anything. According to published government health statistics, worldwide 99.8% of those infected by Covid-19 will survive. As a political satirist, H. L. Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
"Traditional vaccines revolved around injecting part of the pathogen, such as a protein or sugar, to induce an immune response. The COVID mRNA vaccine partly works by inducing local inflammatory reactions to trigger the immune system. The synthetic mRNA material, wrapped in an oily bubble coating made of lipid nanoparticles, delivers instructions to cells to make spike proteins to fight the virus. When synthetic mRNA enters the human patient, the material fuses to cells and cell’s molecules start to decode the genomic sequence to build the spike proteins. The immune system recognizes the spike protein as a foreign invader and produces antibodies against it. If the antibodies later encounter the actual coronavirus, they are ready to recognize and destroy it before it causes illness. Furthermore, the mRNA in the vaccine degrades in roughly 72 hours in order to not combine with human DNA.
According to the Mayo Clinic website, “Gene therapy involves altering the genes inside your body’s cells in an effort to treat or stop disease."
You‘re missing one important point. A pandemic is a global problem. Immunising one country will satisfy the population for a few months, but gives the virus a chance to mutate in another part of the world and reinfect your previously immunized nation.
The only efficient strategy is to immunize the globe simultaneously in the span of a few months. In the long term, nationalist leaders do more harm than good to their nation
Since immunizing the world in the span of a few months is impossible, then is the entire vaccination effort a moot point in your opinion?
Its not impossible. Biontech & pfizer can produce 1 billion doses alone this year, and they are only one of many companies that now have an efficient vaccine.
If you want to prevent mutations that endanger the whole effort you have to slow down spread evenly. This doesnt work if you completely stop the spread locally (ie in one country), while it speeds up everywhere else.
Why do you think the nationalist approach is efficient?
I don't think the nationalist approach is efficient. I just think that if you're within a nation, you definitely get your vaccine quicker than the other nations if your nation is doing the nationalist game properly. The article is really about the efficacy of nationalism in the "nation game."
This is prisoners dilemma stuff, or tragedy of the commons stuff. You have established a winning condition of "globe eradicates covid." The nationalist countries have established a winning condition of "get covid out of our country." This variation of winning conditions is what kinks the game.
And you are an individual. If your goal as an individual is global eradication of covid then you want one policy. If you as an individual want to not catch covid, you want a very different policy.
But thats exactly the point that you are missing. Getting a vaccine early that stops being effective leading to new dangers to personal health + economic damage because of new lockdowns isn‘t what citizens of these nations want either. No one is winning with that approach, its embarassingly shortsighted. You don‘t sound like the type of person that wouldn‘t see that
I don't buy it, quite honestly. I think less virus leads to less mutation, and I'm not convinced that it matters geographically where the "less virus" happens first. Purely mathematically speaking.
Then why would you vaccinate areas of a nation that don‘t have much virus going on first, when there are other hotspots around the world that are more pressing?
Look at what’s happening in India right now, a large country where a new variant emerged that can partially escape the protection from the vaccine. This could’ve been avoidable, had the US exported more of its stockpile (keep in mind that millions of the AZ shot are stockpiled in the US and will probably not even be used once since they aren’t FDA approved). Worst case scenario is that these variants start a new pandemic and the whole vaccination campaign has to start for everyone once again. And this pandemic taught us that the worst case scenario often is one of the more likely scenarios. I know you want this to be about politics or ideologies, but this is about science.
Small problem: The vax rollout plans where made under Bush and Obama admins, not Trump.
Our first exercises for this sort of event where during the Bush era anthrax scares and while those mostly went poorly the Obama-era (post-Katrina) emergency management reforms brought a lot more detail to the exercises and pre-planning. When COVID hit the plans where dusted off and implemented, if rather ineptly and slowly due to leadership failures at the top. What you are seeing the in the US is not the effect of electing a nationalist government. You are seeing the effects of decades of preparation and planning done by professionals. Israel and the UK have similarly effective systems.
European emergency management is an absolute mess.
Maybe the infrastructure, but Trump DID sign an executive order in December insuring Americans get first dibs on any vaccines made on American soil. Without that, who knows what our vaccinations would look like right now.
They would look virtually identical as vaccine priority was decided all the way back about halfway through Bushs' 2nd term. All the EO did was formalize 15 year old policy.
I think this is generally true, but it's definitely questionable how a different president would have approached the issue.
> In the game of nations, do you actually want things to be fair, or do you want your vaccine first?
I would argue that's a false dichotomy. Vaccines aren't something that exists in nature, they only exist because people go to a lot of trouble to make them. So it's entirely fair that these people and countries get first dibs.
This is a semantic argument revolving around the term "fair." I was using David Keating's definition for the article, which is different than your definition. I perhaps should have put the word "fair" in quotes to make that clearer.
Who cares? The REAL issue is these 'vaccines' are not really vaccines. They are experimental drugs that have not been tested. More importantly, while the new Covid vaccines will make billions of dollars for the big pharmaceutical companies, but here’s what they won’t do:
The vaccines will not cure Covid
The vaccines will not prevent people from contracting Covid
The vaccines will not prevent Covid-related hospitalizations
The vaccines will not prevent Covid-caused deaths
So.....are you thinking the same thing I am? Why bother subjecting yourself to an experimental drug that has not been tested, does not do what you think it is supposed to do and, of course, the manufacturers have legal immunity from any responsibility.
"Not really vaccines." Well, they look like vaccines, they get used like vaccines, and the evidence all suggests that they work like vaccines and that they do in fact massively reduce Covid infections and so on.
I guess what I'm saying is that all the evidence at hand indicates that you're talking nonsense.
"So.....are you thinking the same thing I am?"
If you're thinking that you're being fed nonsense bullshit by QAnon and friends, then yes. Otherwise probably no.
For the record, QAnon and RussiaGate is all BS. I do not subscribe to either. All I am asking is that you exercise critical thought and do not believe all the BS shoveled your way by the media. Check these out...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33113270/
My point is these are not vaccines in any traditional sense of the word - they contain no inert virus, they don't confer immunity, they don't prevent contagion.
They are vaccines in the pratical sense of the word; you get one, your resistance to Covid goes up significantly.
As for "they don't prevent contagion"; well, that appears to be in contradiction to the evidence.
If your personal definition of vaccine includes "contains the actual virus", good for you. It seems that the rest of the world is using a different dictionary, so perhaps you should inform people beforehand that you're using a different language to them.
What evidence?
You take a bunch of people, and split them into fair groups. You give some the vaccine, some not. You wait. If the ones who got the vaccine contract Covid at a much lower rate than those who didn't, looking good.
That evidence.
And...where are your links? Or am I to take your word for it?
Or what about this evidence?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33113270/
Or this?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33621437/
Or the best one yet?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2021/03/14/astrazeneca-covid-vaccines-blood-clot-concerns/
Don't be a useful idiot for big pharma.
You're right they don't contain bit of virus. The do contain mRNA which makes virus proteins.
The fascinating thing about the mRNA tech is that it end-arounds one of the greatest frustrations driving the anti-vax community. Yes, these may in fact not be vaccines depending on how you define vaccines. But lo and behold, that may mean that the anti-vaxers are more okay with taking them.
I don't take the flu vaccine, mostly because it fucks me up very badly. I was highly against taking the Covid vaccines until I started to read up on this new technology. It's actually pretty darn cool. Untested and possibly with long term side effects we don't know, including a small chance of getting microchipped by Bill Gates and turned into a Windows Operating System Zombie, but still pretty darn cool. I think I'm going to get it. Just at the end, in May, when the lines are empty.
I am less certain of your claims than you are, although HWFO media analysis would seem to indicate that the importance of vaccines is somewhat, if not largely, overstated.
I intend to stand in the back and let everyone else go first, which would be better for the herd regardless, and then see exactly when we hit HIT. Back in February I projected end of May, and I think that projection still looks pretty solid.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/09/23/covid-19-vaccine-protocols-reveal-that-trials-are-designed-to-succeed/?sh=4c387aa55247
Those are very definitive statements you are making. How do you know the vaccines won’t work?
They are not vaccines. That is my point. I am no doctor but if you read the SEC filing...it is clear that it is not what you think it is.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1682852/000119312518323562/d577473ds1.htm
Look at this quote from Moderna's SEC filing, wherein they aren't allowed to lie or misstate what they are actually developing:
“Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA… We are creating a new category of transformative medicines based on messenger RNA, or mRNA, to improve the lives of patients. From the beginning, we designed our strategy and operations to realize the full potential value and impact of mRNA over a long time horizon across a broad array of human diseases.”
Your argument appears to be the mRNA isn't a vaccine because the SEC filing doesn't use the word "vaccine". But that's silly because arguing about the definitions of a word has no ability to affect nature.
The mRNA (if it works) gets translated in proteins, which go on the surface of a cell, which get recognised by the immune system as foreign (i.e. an antigen), the antigen is remembered by a memory cell, so that if it appears again, the immune system can mount a quicker response to it, so you don't get ill.
I call this a "vaccine". If you want to use a different word, that doesn't affect how it works and what it does.
You call it a vaccine....but it really is not. It is an experimental thing...like a new category of something. It really is gene therapy. Read that statement in the SEC filing as many times as you like. Does it not concern you that it is being distributed without the usual FDA approval, under emergency use permission, and is falsely being called a vaccine? It isn't. It is gene therapy with zero long term safety studies, including zero understanding of long term impact on the immune system. Of course, vaccine sounds way more palatable than "experimental gene therapy with no long term safety studies." Could it be that big pharma is banking on the bet that you won't be able to figure out the difference between a vaccine and something that is not? The way I look at it, the general population is going to be a guinea pig for an experimental gene therapy, not getting a vaccine like the flu shot. Hand wave and filibuster all you like, but that is what it is, per the manufacturer.
> Does it not concern you that it is being distributed without the usual FDA approval, under emergency use permission, and is falsely being called a vaccine?
IDGAF whether they call it a vaccine or not. They can call it a Gigantic Throbbing Humongous Erection for all I care.
> including zero understanding of long term impact on the immune system
And how exactly are we going to find out the long term impact for a treatment of a *novel* disease?
What would you do, say "it's a new disease, so we can't do anything"?
Yeah...for most people we do not need to do anything. According to published government health statistics, worldwide 99.8% of those infected by Covid-19 will survive. As a political satirist, H. L. Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
It's not gene therapy. Is this you using your own personal definition of something again? What do you say "gene therapy" is?
Really...you like to play the "its not in the dictionary" game do you?
https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/83947/covid-mrna-vaccines-are-a-form-of-gene-therapy
An excerpt for you...
"Traditional vaccines revolved around injecting part of the pathogen, such as a protein or sugar, to induce an immune response. The COVID mRNA vaccine partly works by inducing local inflammatory reactions to trigger the immune system. The synthetic mRNA material, wrapped in an oily bubble coating made of lipid nanoparticles, delivers instructions to cells to make spike proteins to fight the virus. When synthetic mRNA enters the human patient, the material fuses to cells and cell’s molecules start to decode the genomic sequence to build the spike proteins. The immune system recognizes the spike protein as a foreign invader and produces antibodies against it. If the antibodies later encounter the actual coronavirus, they are ready to recognize and destroy it before it causes illness. Furthermore, the mRNA in the vaccine degrades in roughly 72 hours in order to not combine with human DNA.
According to the Mayo Clinic website, “Gene therapy involves altering the genes inside your body’s cells in an effort to treat or stop disease."