These are pretty consistent with the numbers I have been seeing also. 80% effective is still pretty darned effective, but the number needed to reach herd immunity goes up with the decreasing protection. Still important to get the shot, mostly because the next iteration may well drive that number lower still. We need to remove the dry timber if we want to stop the fire.
As long as they are using the Total Recall probe to do the COVID testing, Iâm good with it.
Well I guess there was plenty of hubris to go around
Preliminary confirmation of a long-held suspicion regarding the etiology of this bastard. Would not take it as gospel, not by a long shot, just yet, but it does suggest we are on the right track, anyway.
âMedical Cartel Member?â Do we get member cards and ID badges? I must have missed out on mine! Damn!!
âAbsolutely, our jobs are getting harder,â said Mitra Amirzadeh, a flight attendant who also works for a major airline. âWe had a gate agent that was punched in the head so bad, so severely, that she had to go to the hospital and ended up with a knot the size of an orange ⌠on top of her forehead.â
And lockdowns also destroyed childrenâs mental health!
Shouldâve added an /s up there.
I get links to this kind of stuff a lot from relatives. How would you respond?
If youâd rather not click through, this seems to be the gist:
Looking forward, one serious concern is that the government will reinstitute restrictions in the autumn and winter when cases will most likely rise. This would be a grave mistake. One can only hope that our leaders hold fast to the current message; that we must accept COVID-19 as an endemic virus and allow young people to get on with living.
And whatâs that professor saying at the end about this being an âendemicâ virus? Is that common, to call it that instead of a pandemic?
Life is gonna be hell for retail and restaurant workers once this is back in place
Since many workers in those places have decided to find other careers, more shops and restaurants will probably close permanently. I donât blame them - who wants to deal with deniers and their drama all day?
Endemic means that it is a part of the environment, essentially forever, and we must just accept the number of dead as the norm. IOW, give up.
Ah, thanks. I wondered about it in regards to the current pandemic. Certainly in line with what these oh so much smarter than the experts relatives are thinking. Ugh.
So, a conversation I had on here has been rattling around in my brain, trying to find an answer. Hang on to your hats, we are going on a patented âDocâs stream of consciousness flume ride.â
The question came up in one of those âif they wonât get vaccinated, fine, let them dieâ subthreads, and i had said I just could not support that. I was then asked, what is the answer then? A very reasonable question. I had no answer, and said so. But I could not let that go, and so, here is my answer, way too much later.
I donât see this in terms of a broad debate, because for me, it is fought one-to-one on a daily basis, talking to parents about vaccinating their children. I think I win more over than I donât, but it is not by any means 100%. Therefore, I see that minds can be changed, but not by media battering or slogans, rather by caring interactions. Here is one approach that I have found particularly successful, and i release it into the wild in hopes you fine folks might make use of it!
The very common scenario this applies to is this: âI donât want my child to be part of some experiment to see what the long term effects of this vaccine are!â Very understandable concern. Hereâs the catch. Covid is is very new. We donât have a very good handle on what the long term effects of that are either. Your child is going to be part of the experiment no matter what you do. Your choice is limited to whether they will be in the vaccinated or unvaccinated arm. I have assessed the risk of being vaccinated as much much less than of contracting the disease and taking my chances there. And, crucially, with where we are now, if you are not vaccinated, you will catch the disease. No opting out, only choosing which arm of the experiment you are in. At this point, reading the parent, I can go into more depth on the statistics of long covid vs vaccine side effects, I can go into the executive monkey experiment (seriously, in certain settings, that works. Especially with more anxious parents!) or I can just leave it there and take questions, letting them take the lead. It is time consuming, but itâs what I do. And I am pretty good at it.
And that, finally, is why I canât just say âscrew 'em, let them eat shit and die.â
Thank you for your patience. 
Thank you for your wisdom!
I am also frustrated by the âlet them dieâ contingent. Even if one lacks empathy for the antivaxxers themselves, it doesnât end there. Do they not realize that, when weâre talking about hundreds of millions of Americans, that means that very many vaccinated people will die, too? When we talk about tiny numbers as a percentage, and multiply it by 330M, the result indeed ends up quite unacceptably large.
ETA: And the global implications are enormous. Americans are a very mobile bunch, and all these antivaxxers are going to spread new variants not just within US borders, but throughout global populations with lower vaccination rates, mainly because we have sat on so many doses of the vaccine! 
