That’s the whole thing. The mRNA vaccines have very few ingredients – it is the mRNA, the protein coat, some buffering and ionic balance, and that’s basically it. That is actually the reason for the rule that all doses from the multi-dose vial must be administered within 6 hours – unlike most multi-dose vaccines they don’t have preservatives.
The flu vaccine is produced much differently. They are made with whole viruses, either inactivated or attenuated. Viruses need living cells to reproduce and for the flu the substrate of choice is fertilized chicken eggs. The virus is extracted and purified so there is a very small but non-zero amount of egg protein remaining in the vaccine. That is why people with severe egg allergies are recommended to get different vaccines although adverse reactions to the egg content are rare (it’s far more common to have an adverse effect to the target antigen itself). There are some other egg grown vaccines but none of the COVID vaccines in the US have any egg component.
i don’t disagree. my point more is: did 1400 doctors just walkout or 1400 janitors? not only is it easier to hire non-medical healthcare industry workers, the story it conveys to the public is different.
( full disclosure ive got a friend who works as a janitor at a hospital. good strong union job too! my friend is vaccinated, but definitely has coworkers who are old white dude trump supporters )
I’d share your suspicion that healthcare’s numbers are probably lower than a significant number of other industries; but what is disturbing about them is that it’s both an area where high levels of close, hard to fully PPE or engineering control, contact between you and a mixture of infectious and/or medically fragile members of the public is routine, it’s an area where employees should score well above average on the “has seen real people, really dying quite horribly despite aggressive intervention” scale; and(we, in our childlike innocence, hope; would score way above average on a combination of reasonably deep technical knowledge of medicine and a general assumption that the areas of medicine you aren’t a subject matter expert on are being handled by people who are and taking their guidance is good practice).
In their capacity as members of the public, and potential colleague/client/etc. infectors we obviously want people to be getting vaccinated period; but it’s not like we expect mostly-remote sysadmins to have seen people die while on the job; or people in one of the heavy oxycontin zones to have an attitude of general trust toward statements made from medical authority.
Beyond the immediate concern of “just get fucking vaccinated, FFS”; I think what most alarms me about healthcare specifically is how many people the COVID situation has turned up who, apparently, trust facebook memes and OANN talking heads more than the body of knowledge and institutional expertise they allegedly studied when on the job and making actual medical decisions. Even if there weren’t a plague on; that would be goddamn terrifying.
One expects to run into some cranks in all walks of life(with some industries having a bit of a reputation; others more or less population-level); but you more usually expect the crankery to be either unrelated to, or convenient to but not related to the practice of, the actual job. Does your IT guy have very strong convictions that cryptocurrency is the answer to a laundry list of things caused by a shadowy fiat-money cabal? Possibly. Would you expect his belief in financial-sector lizard people to affect his troubleshooting technique? Not so much. Is it more or less a default assumption that extraction industry people(both the high-powered specialists, HPC-crunching oil and gas geologist types, and the construction/blasting/equipment operation) to have a convenient disbelief in climate change? Probably pretty safe. Do you expect them to analyze ground penetrating radar results or construct oil wells differently because of that belief? No, you usually expect that they accept going with best available technique when it counts.
While I agree with all of that, I think you are discounting (or at least undercounting) the strength of the MAGAt tolerance for cognitive dissonance. If it fits their world view, they see willing to toss aside any and all ability to rationally assess risk and danger, or scientific knowledge (which, let’s face it, tends to be hard and require some effort) in favor of easy to digest talking points. Long story short, there are 22 million healthcare workers out there. In a group that big, there will be assholes. No way around that.
No disagreement there; I’d hardly expect healthcare workers to be different from people generally in terms of cognitive dissonance/compartmentalization/motivated reasoning, etc. I was just focused on the ‘vaccine resistance by industry; Brainspore suspects that healthcare is better than average’ aspect; and the fact that this seemed to be an area where I’d have assumed that direct, unmediated by a-friend-of-a-cousin’s-instagram experience would be more common than average; and where the cognitive dissonance was running directly counter to the job.
I’d certainly have expected greater than 0%(given reports of people belligerently denying that they have the hoax chinese virus even as they are being intubated I’m not expecting even very personal experience to carry enough water for everyone); it’s just striking to me given that my experience(totally outside medicine in terms of my own job and immediate social circle, some doctors of various stripes are family friends) is that people believe all kinds of crazy stuff; but it’s vastly less common to believe things that are actively counterproductive to whatever it is you do; and if you do believe some things that are it’s typical to believe that off the clock and then operate as though you believe the set of useful industry knowledge 9-to-5.
Yup. The way they deal with cognitive dissonance is to stop thinking. It’s genius. If they just do what they’re told by right wing authority figures, they’ll never have to think a day in their life.
