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Another COVID Video - It's Okay to Be Smart
4 years ago
General
-- DEVIANTART -- WEASYL -- SOFURRY -- TWITTER -- BLUESKY --I am going to try and break down the points into little bullets for those who wants a sort of cliff notes version.
1. The COVID vaccine will not guarantee that someone will not get an infection, no vaccine ever has. Flu shots each year have 4 different strains and depending how they were predicted they will have different levels of effectiveness. We also have means today of detecting even just a few piece of viral make up, making our testing so sensitive that you can test positive without actually having an active infection, and sometimes the remnant particles are enough too.
2. The Base Rate Fallacy is what people are falling victim to now, as the number of vaccinations goes up, it will only be natural to see the number of COVID cases in the vaccinated group go up. They use an American Football analogy to illustrate, but in short you have 10 people playing X sport and 5 wear safety gear and 5 do not in the first year. In that year 1 person with the safety gear gets injured and 3 of the people not wearing gear get injured. But second year, everyone wears safety gear and only 2 people get injured. So more people with safety gear got injured, but fewer people total got injured. And this is an easy statistical fallacy to fall into.
3. Natural immunity can sometimes be stronger, but your immune system makes very specific antibodies, so there is no way of knowing if it will protect you from future outbreaks. If you did have COVID, getting the vaccine will increase your overall immunity. Also trying for natural immunity is a risky game, you can't be immune if you are dead. And some people are having months long quality of life health issues, some are even going to have life long health complications going forward.
4. Variants - It is not a matter of if variant will occur, but when they will occur. Each virus makes billions of copies inside your body and almost all of them will have some sort of genetic error, so much so that there will likely be at least 1 of each type of possible mutation. The problem is the longer the virus is allowed to spread and replicate, the rare chance a dangerous combination of mutations will occur drastically increases. It's like winning the lottery, your individual odds are extremely small, but when you have enough people playing, someone will win, and winning in this case, could mean higher infection rates from this virus. So getting as many people vaccinated as best as possible is not only important for your health, but for everyone's health and YOUR future health by helping ensure that it is not given an opportunity to change.
5. Boosters - I think this video was made before Pfizer announced that it's Booster would be open to the people who feel they are in high risk conditions for exposure to the virus, and Moderna has given the okay for Boosters for those who are immuno-compromised. Right now it is just the same vaccine being given again, because Pfizer was showing decreased levels of antibody presence in cases of those who were vaccinated and in the hospital at about 80% were Moderna's was still showing higher levels of antibody presence. Now immunity is complicated, but effectively as time goes on, the memory immune cells slowly decreases the longer you are not exposed to a virus or bacterium. They give you are card to another video that explains it more in detail. But it is why you have a Tetanus booster about every 5 to 10 years.
Now some people are asking, if we are going to be stuck with this, they ask, what is the point of all the masks and social distancing and other disruptions, and the points are basically this:
-It will prevent more people from dying from this disease, because right now about 1 in 500 people in the US of died from COVID.
-It would give us a chance to better understand the disease and find better ways of dealing with it.
-It would give hospitals the opportunity to treat critically ill patients that are not COVID related. (This one, especially, because I have been told a story about about a person's relative going in for an appendicitis, which was triaged as not critical until it became absolutely critical once it burst. What should have been an easy procedure and a a few days in the hospital, became weeks.)
-More importantly it means that we will potentially have a shorter time of having to deal with this as a pandemic. The longer people go without getting vaccines, or following the rules, the longer it will take to get through the pandemic and the more people who will die as a result and the ripple effect consequences that will have on the rest of society.
But also like saying "Janssen vaccines causes blot clots" without also saying that it only happened in something like 0.00008% of people when the potential link came out, and if anything I would have liked to see if it was a causal thing versus just coincidence, kind of like ope, my 89 yo grandpa died a week after getting vaccinated. While that is unfortunate, it is more likely that he just died because he was old, that stuff happens, but looking at the raw numbers, people fall into some of the fallacies by just looking at the surface level data without actually understand what those numbers means and why they look the way they do. I mean I know not everyone can take stats for life science, but some of it also just kind of basic lack of logically thinking through and more just a gut reaction and running.
On a related note, the right-wing evangelicals have begun weaving Trump into their theology. They see him as a messiah...a modern day Christ. I've seen some pastors even say that in the coming decades, people will begin to use Trump's presidency to mark a new epoch, with the calendar starting over with "Before Trump" and "After Trump" periods.
Why is this related? Because these are a lot of the same people who are against the vaccine at all costs. They're the same people who follow the whole Q bullshit. Over recent decades, right-wing politicians and religious leaders have broken down the barriers separating politics from theology, meaning politics has become a part of their theology. They now view the vaccine the same way they view Evolution, or Big Bang cosmology, or deep time; it's antithetical to their faith and they will oppose it at all costs.
There will be no reasoning with or reaching these people. "Vaccine bad" has become a fixed belief that is backed by religious fervor. All the data in the world won't help if the people you're trying to present it to have closed their eyes, ears, and minds.
That seems very problematic, and again it comes more down to that being the psychology of the people because in theory things could be flipped seeing that the political parties have flipped on their opinions and stances before.
Well I mean, let's just hope that the Church doesn't become the State again.
Cougar mentioned Darwinism. It is indeed a necessary step for our survival that the antivaxxers dwindle their numbers. If not Covid it would be measles or mumps or whatever future-bug is yet on the horizon. Better this than something like Ebola, which kills just about everyone it infects.
And let's be honest here. We're in Year 2 of this pandemic...a year that is only a pandemic year because enough antivaxxers didn't take the vaccine. Data supporting mitigation measures as well as the shots are widely available and shared on every media platform. If someone is still anti-vaxx after all that, they aren't going to change their minds.
It is sad because I have family who has fallen down into this trap. (Granted it is the same side of the family I hardly talked to as is.)