DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Covid Fright Night Part 4

Except everyone is laughing at you. I thought you said you had me on ignore.

I think he was sincerely presenting facts. The numbers are what they are. Any race-baiting would be in the conversation behind these numbers, to which you added a really interesting point with your link.

I didn't read your link, but I can understand where you're coming from regarding your specific health situation and the virus/vaccine. Obviously, I don't quite agree, but I can empathize.

I will leave with 1 final argument, though... and that is that all of the side effects that have popped up have a much smaller probability of severely hurting you than catching some serious 'rona. I know the numbers are on your side regarding probably not getting seriously hit by the virus, but the numbers are even more on your side regarding not getting hit with serious side effects of the vaccine.

To your point, those numbers don't include the unknown which can be tough to ignore when a new vaccine is developed and tested like this one was. All we can do is look at the data we have, though, and weigh the numbers against each other.

I find it amazing that over 90% of deaths and hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated and we still have people on here trying to reason the vaccine is somehow bad.

How they claim they would ask for an animal dewormer if they are hospitalized based on scant evidence then claim the vaccine isn't proven? The treatment they would be asking for has far less evidence if having any value than the vaccine. Then one only needs to look at the fact that Remdesivir has actually been proven to help lessen Covid symptoms in many patients and is FDA approved for that exact use. It's simply astounding that it's so obvious they have no idea what's going on outside of their little bubble.

I hope, that in the event they do become hospitalized, they gain enough common sense to ask for Remdesivir instead of Ivermectin. But then there are some things you can't fix. Being stuck in your bubble rather than basing things on actual evidence is one of those things.

Well, there's also the fact that if you keep shouting something over and over again, apparently it becomes true...at least to you (the general you, not you specifically).

IIRC, Remdesivir is generally considered the preferred treatment option (at least here in the US), but even that has a lot of ?s. I wouldn't mind Biden doing a 'Operation Warp Speed 2: Electric Boogaloo' to seek out and identify or develop a go-to treatment option with some ironclad data behind it. If we could settle on a treatment option, that would be a pretty great 1-2 punch vs the virus.

His math is wrong though....




First - these numbers are not what is in the actual article - but even they aren't consistent.

If 57% of the 28% of people who aren't vaccinated are white -- then 15.96% of *ALL PEOPLE** (not **white people**) are unvaccinated **white people**).

That does not mean that 1-0.1596 = 0.8404 of white people are vaccinated, because you are substituting in white people for all people (ironic?)

If 15.96% of all people in the US are unvaccinated white people, and white people are 72% of the US population, and 72% of the population is vaccinated as a whole -- then

0.1596 (fraction of all people who are unvaccinated white people) / 0.72 (fraction of people who are white) = 0.221 (fraction of white people who are unvaccinated white people).

So 1-0.221 = 0.779 = 77.9% is the fraction of white people who are vaccinated.

Its about the same (though slightly higher) than the fractions of black and hispanic people are vaccinated -- but lower than the fraction of Asian people who are vaccinated.

Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford.

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161026-how-liars-create-the-illusion-of-truth

And it's certainly not a new concept.

I would just like to see the protest signs that would come out involving the word "Boogaloo."

I completely agree with you conceptually. I think my fear, based on what we've seen with the vaccine and the veterinary drug, is that if this administration ramps up a treatment drug, that people will refuse that, again, based on politics. The other side of my brain, though, says that if they're getting treatment and they're in serious condition, that might change their perspective.

Ask Lamar Jackson

It does still have some questions. My point is if anyone is looking for actual facts or data with which to base a decision on, there is far more evidence supporting the use of Remdesivir to lessen Covid symptoms than there is to support Ivermectin. Actually I've seen little to no evidence supporting Ivermectin.

But if you've been convinced somehow that a pandemic is political, you would never look outside of your bubble to actually see that kind of evidence. You aren't actually looking at what has and and hasn't been shown to be the most effective treatment at reducing symptoms.

I'll use Faucci as an example. His career has gone on under six different presidents. Republican and Democrat. His job is with an agency that is designed to protect the health of Americans. There's nothing political about Faucci, the NIH, the FDA or the CDC.

It seems to be all the rage these days that when anyone says or recommends something you disagree with, just apply the label that they're political and you can get a large swath of people to ignore the very people that know the most about something.

It's quite sad.

The Federal government has purchased 1.7 million courses of Molupiravir, a new, COVID specific oral medication developed by Merck. Discovered by a team at Emory University. It still has to complete the clinical trials and such but there’s thoughts it could reach use by the end of the year. Having an oral anti viral will be a game changer. Early detection and treatment will save lives.

I hadn't heard of that but that's big news. Thank you for putting that out there.

Merck was actually working on developing this drug pre-covid for use against the flu and found activity against Covid-19

iT’s BEeN rUsHEd… nO Way i’M tAKinG ThAt biLL gATes pOpULaTiOn coNtRoL POisOn.
…WonDEr iF I CaN bUY iT At tHE FeED StORe?

that is big news.

it could be a game changer

Just had a COVID test this morning for work. Negative, but more importantly my blood is still showing a strong antibody load 6 months out from my vaccine. Not that it’ll change my work or social behavior but it’s reassuring to know.

Just look at the links posted by SB.

What else can you say? These type of people fit precisley into the category of taking animal dewormer.

He posted a video of guy saying that all who received the vaccine will die six months. And any teens that got vaccinated will be sterile.

Alex Jones is another source for SB as well. The guy who claimed Sandy Hook was a hoax.

There is no cure for that type of mentality.

j/c...

Some news on the J&J booster trials...

Re: the mandate for service members.... they were probably required to wait on full approval. They had their finger hovering over the button on this mandating for when an approval came down. I would expect something similar for all federal employees at some point.

Question for anyone out there who knows about viruses, vaccines, etc....

With everyone throwing booster shots all over the place, is there any worry that these will lose their effectiveness if overused? I don't even know if that's actually a thing, but can you body become too use to these vaccinations and not put up the appropriate immune response? Does it work like antibiotics where overuse leads to the virus finding a way around the treatment?

That's a really good question and I'd like to see a response from someone who's qualified.

In my highly-unqualified speculation, I wouldn't think that viruses react the same way that some bacteria do since you don't really see outbreaks of things like "evolved" smallpox or mumps, but that is purely just my thought process with zero qualifications to back it up.

That's what I was thinking as well, but just don't know if virus can/will act the same way.

Not with mRNA vaccines -- though this can be a concern with adenovirus-based vaccinations (like J&J and AstraZeneca).

In those cases - the vaccine is made by taking an adenovirus (which is a family of viruses that can infect cells - but rarely cause serious illness). But then they modify that virus so that instead of producing more viruses once it infects a cell (like a normal virus) - it instead produces the spike protein for Covid. The cell then releases those spike proteins, which get detected by the immune system -- and the immune system attacks them and then produces long-lived antibodies to detect the Covid spike protein and destroy it in the future.

You can run the risk -- if you have lots of adenovirus based vaccines -- that your body will start mounting an effective defense to the original adenovirus before it has a chance to enter your cells -- meaning that your body kills the adenovirus **before** it can can produce the spike proteins that the vaccine was designed to produce. This usually isn't a huge concern (the injection has tons of adenovirus in it -- and some of it should escape your immune system and make it into cells) - but it's potentially a concern.

The mRNA vaccines don't use any virus. They inject mRNA -- which is a cellular instruction code -- which tells your cells how to make spike proteins. Your cells then make spike-proteins (like in the adenovirus case) and release them - and your immune system then attacks those spike proteins, giving you an antibody response.

The difference here - is that mRNA is not often found outside cells because it breaks down super quickly -- and is not something your immune system attacks. So your immune response won't break down the mRNA before it gets into cells and tells them to make spike proteins.



This part won't really happen - if your immune system is functioning -- and it sees an unusual protein -- it will attack it, and then build antibodies capable of detecting it and killing it in the future. There is probably a bit of the opposite effect -- for 3rd/4th/5th vaccinations -- you will probably be *super-protected** for the first week or two after the vaccination - because your immune system will respond to the latest vaccine by producing more "covid-killing antibodies" and they will be floating through your body for the next week or two in large numbers.



Potentially - and this is the major concern that affects how vaccines are made. The size of the Covid-19 virus is 30 kb (30,000 base pairs long long -- there are ~4 base pairs, and sets of 3 of them code for the ~20 nucleic acids that make up viruses (and cells). This specific sequence of 30,000 of them is the code that tells Covid how to enter human cells and then how to replicate to make more of itself, and escape from the cell).

This may seem crazy (it's like a 30 kilobit computer virus, essentially -- very small and very good at replicating itself). However, it's actually mostly junk -- most of the 30,000 nucleic acids don't do anything, they are just along for the ride.

The spike protein is the part that unlocks cells that it comes into contact with (specifically, it bonds to ACE-2 receptors that lie on the surface of human (and many animal) cells - and tells them to open the cell.) The spike protein is only 3000 base pairs long (so roughly 1/10 of the virus).


So why do Pfizer, Moderna (and also J&J and AstraZeneca) chose to build a vaccine for that specific part of the virus? In theory, you could build a vaccine that includes the protein structure of **any** part of the 30,000 bases in Covid - and that would cause your immune system to recognize that part and attack it.

However, because most of those sections of the virus don't *do* anything -- random mutations can significantly change those parts of the virus without affecting its ability to enter human cells and infect them. If you built a vaccine that attacked a random non-functional part of the virus, some virus particles would mutate in that region, the mutated viruses would avoid the vaccine - and then they would continue to spread.

Viruses actually mutate constantly - any person who has Covid probably has thousands of different random mutations in their body at any one time. The good news is that most mutations don't do anything -- because those parts of the virus are inactive.

However, certain regions - like the spike protein -- have to be exactly right. They have to connect on an atomic level to the ACE-2 receptor, and tell it to open up the cell. These are called "highly conserved regions" of a virus -- because any mutation in those regions will break the virus and make it unable to propagate. That is why the vaccine targets that region -- because if the virus tries to mutate in that region -- it probably won't be able to infect cells anymore.

The few mutations we've seen (Alpha, Beta, Delta, etc.) are the rare exceptions to that rule. 99.99999% of the mutations in the spike protein make the virus **worse** at infecting human cells. But a few of them potentially make the virus **better** at infecting cells.

For example, the Delta variant is defined as:

"The Delta variant has mutations in the gene encoding the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein[6] causing the substitutions D614G, T478K, P681R and L452R."

which means that (starting from some zero position) the 614th base pair is switched from "D" (the nucleic acid Aspartic Acid) to "G" (Glynine), the base pair at position 478 has switched from (T) threonine to (K) lysine, then there are switches of specific acids at positions 681 and 452 as well. This happens to be a good solution - it makes the virus better at infecting human cells.

There are a couple other "conserved regions" that you could build a vaccine to target. There's a specific region that helps code the outer membrane of the virus that prevents it from breaking down immediately when it exits an infected persons body, for example. In theory you could get a booster shot that targets a different virus region - to have a more resilient protection against variations in the spike protein.

One interesting sidenote - is that when you get an actual Covid infection -- you do get antibodies to every random part of the virus that exists (your immune system doesn't actually know **where** the spike protein of the virus is -- it just produces antibodies to every part of the virus it finds). This would allow a test to determine whether you actually got Covid, or had antibodies due to vaccinations (most tests just look at the spike protein though -- so they don't differentiate the two).

This also affects how your immune system will work for subsequent exposures. People who had covid will have an immune response that targets every part of the virus. People who had the vaccine will have an immune response that only targets the spike protein. However, the vaccine tends to produce a much much **stronger** response to the spike protein than previously infected people. The antibody response to spike proteins is around 10x larger for vaccinated people, than for people who previously got sick. This is probably why vaccines seem to offer better protection than previous illness.

That's about it.

I tried to edit to add this -- but it didn't work.

I vastly oversimplified the workings of the immune system above -- because I don't think it is that important to the main point. But there are lots of different details (antibodies, t-cells, b-cells, etc.) that all play different roles in how the immune system targets Covid.

The key is that the vaccine produces a very strong immune response specific to the spike protein, while infection produces a moderately strong response to many different parts of the virus.

Good stuff -- thanks for all the info!

That was an amazingly informative, well-written, and educational post. I'm so very glad you wrote that.

Thank you very much.

You should copy/ paste that post to start COVID PART 5.

(If you don't, I might, a lot of useful info there for reference.)

*Meant to quote Lyuokdea*

No crap. Wasting away in a Covid world for 18 months and find the most well-written explanation of vaccines at Dawgtalkers!

Well know you know. lol

Thanks Lyuokdea.

lol! Right!?