On the Deaths of Two Unvaccinated Florida IT Workers (msn.com) 339
I sometimes talk about "the family of geeks" — how our shared experiences can bring us together.
But if that's true, there's been a death in the family.... Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes, who is also an epidemiologist, said six unvaccinated employees, including five in the IT department, tested positive for the virus within a two-week period.
The two IT employees who died last week were identified in local media and obituaries as Mary Knight, 58, and Alphonso Cox, 53.
Hopes said that the one IT employee, 23, exposed to the virus who was vaccinated did not get infected. "This particular outbreak demonstrates the effectiveness, I believe, with the vaccine," he said to reporters Monday. "All of the cases were non-vaccinated. They were unvaccinated." He added in a news release, "Individual employees in the IT Department who were known to be fully vaccinated and who were in close proximity of those who were infected did not contract COVID-19."
But even with the outbreak, masks will remain optional for staffers returning this week, with unvaccinated workers being "encouraged but not required, to follow covid-19 prevention measures...." Manatee County, located in southwest Florida, has fully vaccinated 43 percent of its eligible population. The Manatee Board of County Commissioners repealed coronavirus safety requirements last month and strongly recommended that people visiting the County Administration Building "use their best judgment" to protect themselves from a potential spread of the virus...
When the second employee died Thursday, the decision was made to shut down the building the next day so it could be disinfected. "When you have that many cases, and you have a 40 percent fatality rate, you have to worry," Hopes said to Florida Politics. "I would prefer not to have any more employee funerals." Yet the county announced over the weekend that "face masks will be optional for the public and employees inside the facility...."
Funerals and celebration-of-life events for Knight and Cox are scheduled to take place later this week.
Thanks to Slashdot reader luis_a_espinal (a Florida-based software engineer) for sharing the story. Country administrator Hopes is concerned, reports the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, because "Of the first five cases, all were sick enough to be hospitalized or died. That's not the normal COVID variant that we saw last year." And yet... As officials work to control the outbreak, questions have been raised about how far the county can go to keep employees safe — including whether it can inquire about employees' vaccination status, since the recent victims so far have not been fully vaccinated... "We are allowed to ask," Hopes said. "But they don't have to tell us, and whatever their response is, we are not to ask any further." Manatee County School District General Counsel Mitch Teitelbaum said the school district had the same understanding of privacy laws...
[The county-owned seaport] Port Manatee had reported three new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, spurring fears that the virus was continuing to spread among the county's workforce. On Tuesday, port spokeswoman Virginia Zimmerman said the three cases had been an "aberration" and that there are not any additional cases to report. Zimmerman said the port does not inquire about employees' vaccination status, and that the port "encourages, but does not require, staff to be vaccinated."
While the county scrambles to mitigate the spread of the virus, Hopes said many county employees are grieving the loss of their coworkers.
"These weren't just colleagues," Hopes said. "These people have basically lived at work together for 20 years, and this happened quickly."
But if that's true, there's been a death in the family.... Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes, who is also an epidemiologist, said six unvaccinated employees, including five in the IT department, tested positive for the virus within a two-week period.
The two IT employees who died last week were identified in local media and obituaries as Mary Knight, 58, and Alphonso Cox, 53.
Hopes said that the one IT employee, 23, exposed to the virus who was vaccinated did not get infected. "This particular outbreak demonstrates the effectiveness, I believe, with the vaccine," he said to reporters Monday. "All of the cases were non-vaccinated. They were unvaccinated." He added in a news release, "Individual employees in the IT Department who were known to be fully vaccinated and who were in close proximity of those who were infected did not contract COVID-19."
But even with the outbreak, masks will remain optional for staffers returning this week, with unvaccinated workers being "encouraged but not required, to follow covid-19 prevention measures...." Manatee County, located in southwest Florida, has fully vaccinated 43 percent of its eligible population. The Manatee Board of County Commissioners repealed coronavirus safety requirements last month and strongly recommended that people visiting the County Administration Building "use their best judgment" to protect themselves from a potential spread of the virus...
When the second employee died Thursday, the decision was made to shut down the building the next day so it could be disinfected. "When you have that many cases, and you have a 40 percent fatality rate, you have to worry," Hopes said to Florida Politics. "I would prefer not to have any more employee funerals." Yet the county announced over the weekend that "face masks will be optional for the public and employees inside the facility...."
Funerals and celebration-of-life events for Knight and Cox are scheduled to take place later this week.
Thanks to Slashdot reader luis_a_espinal (a Florida-based software engineer) for sharing the story. Country administrator Hopes is concerned, reports the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, because "Of the first five cases, all were sick enough to be hospitalized or died. That's not the normal COVID variant that we saw last year." And yet... As officials work to control the outbreak, questions have been raised about how far the county can go to keep employees safe — including whether it can inquire about employees' vaccination status, since the recent victims so far have not been fully vaccinated... "We are allowed to ask," Hopes said. "But they don't have to tell us, and whatever their response is, we are not to ask any further." Manatee County School District General Counsel Mitch Teitelbaum said the school district had the same understanding of privacy laws...
[The county-owned seaport] Port Manatee had reported three new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, spurring fears that the virus was continuing to spread among the county's workforce. On Tuesday, port spokeswoman Virginia Zimmerman said the three cases had been an "aberration" and that there are not any additional cases to report. Zimmerman said the port does not inquire about employees' vaccination status, and that the port "encourages, but does not require, staff to be vaccinated."
While the county scrambles to mitigate the spread of the virus, Hopes said many county employees are grieving the loss of their coworkers.
"These weren't just colleagues," Hopes said. "These people have basically lived at work together for 20 years, and this happened quickly."
Florida, man (Score:5, Funny)
Not being vaccinated is probably a requirement for working in a Florida IT department.
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At Centner Academy in Miami, that's not a joke.
https://www.usnews.com/news/be... [usnews.com]
The Florida legislature debated a bill to protect vaccinated people from employment discrimination and voted it down.
Who caaaarrrrreeesssssssss (Score:2, Insightful)
Trying to convince anti-vax dumbfucks to question their decisions by presenting a bunch of self-indulgent preachy maudlin bullshit about tech workers dying works about as well as trying to convince your dog not to shit in the house by showing it a Powerpoint about cholera. No matter how right you are, you're still wasting your breath.
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Exactly! These articles are honestly starting to piss me off. These journalists are operating under the assumption that they are living in 1940 and that they are the only channel on the TV.
People who don't want the vaccine for dumb reasons arent reading these article. They're not browsing this website, and they sure as hell arent going to listen to you when you come and say "Oh wow, YET AGAIN 2 more people die of the virus." We have been reading these same lines since the beginning of the pandemic, now with
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Aww man, they must have cheated me and kept the dopamine for themselves. I didn't get as sick as I expected from the second jab -- I'd say that aside from my arm being sore for five days, it was actually less severe than my reaction to the first jab -- but I sure as hell didn't get any bliss out of it.
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You and me both, brother. It just dissolves into this constant low-key din of depressing mawkish downer bullshit that serves no purpose and is impossible to escape from. Cordon it off with the global warming articles and let me be free of it. I promise that if I ever end up in charge of an oil megacorp or find myself in a reverse Bill D. Cat situation where my brain is implanted into Donald Trump's body I'll do what needs to be done, but until that time please just fuck off and let me breathe.
"Not normal COVID variant we saw last year.â (Score:3)
Virtually all to deaths are unvaccinated (Score:4, Insightful)
Go ahead and mod me down but if you actually look into it you'll find that the pattern repeats again and again. In 2008 when the economy crashed the Republican party did everything they could to prevent the Democrats from addressing the crisis. It's smashed and grab is what it is. When the Republican party is in charge they grab as much money and power for themselves as they can. When they're inevitably cast out of office due to incompetence and the damage they do they focus on smashing as much as they can so that voters will blame the people in charge at the time.
And you're never allowed to talk about the partisan divide because we've been all been conditioned not to.
So you get the Republican party's propaganda apparatus in the form of Tucker Carlson literally saying that doctors are lying about whether the vaccine works, and we're all just supposed to pretend that they have the best intentions. It's absurd on the face of it. At some point we either acknowledge that one party is actively trying to end democracy and harm us in order to grab as much power as they can, or we give up democracy so we can pretend we're all getting along in the bipartisan fashion.
Of course all the Republicans on this forum are going to take this as a personal attack like I made fun of their favorite sports team. So instead of reading what I wrote and thinking about it and reflecting on it, every one of them was mod points is going to dogpile on me. And it becomes my responsibility to worry about and care about their feelings so I can desperately try to convince them that they should try and protect democracy. It's incredibly frustrating.
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*shrug* Why would I take it that way when both parties are a mess. We didn't need to have a two-party system but historically that's how it worked out. Other nations have more than two parties.
Re:Virtually all to deaths are unvaccinated (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's absolutely infuriating that we've made vaccination a political issue...
...as you proceed to dogshit-pile on one particular political party, as if there are really sides or isles in a swamp.
And it becomes my responsibility to worry about and care about their feelings so I can desperately try to convince them that they should try and protect democracy. It's incredibly frustrating.
Well, since we're not making this political and want to protect democracy, perhaps you should worry more about President Dementia and his laughing hyena sidekick, since they are the ones who are relevant now. Continuing to point fingers and blame the past or the "other side", is doing nothing but feeding the flames and playing their pointless game of distracting the masses while BOTH partie
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Re:Virtually all to deaths are unvaccinated (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course all the Republicans on this forum are going to take this as a personal attack like I made fun of their favorite sports team. So instead of reading what I wrote and thinking about it and reflecting on it, every one of them was mod points is going to dogpile on me. And it becomes my responsibility to worry about and care about their feelings so I can desperately try to convince them that they should try and protect democracy. It's incredibly frustrating.
You're going to "protect democracy" by demonizing a whole party, IT firms colluding to suppress speech and so forth? Um, ok.
Your interpretations of events and history are just wrong. I disagree, and it doesn't make me a monster.
Safety vs privacy (Score:2)
Imagine if the police officer who pulls you over isn't allowed to ask if you've been drinking or even if you're licensed. Is that how far privacy should be protected?
It's annoying how registering to vote puts you on mailing lists and search engines but asking whether you're a potential health hazard to those around you violates your privacy.
Which meme fits the best? (Score:3)
Which meme fits best? Can we get a poll?
1. F*cked Around and Found Out
2. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
3. Well, well, well, if it's not the consequences of my own actions
4. Mistakes: It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others
I hardly think these deaths merit a Darwin award, since both "victims" were in their 50's. If they had not managed to reproduce by now, they had already edited themselves out of the gene pool.
Anyway, sad for their families. May their deaths motivate others to get vaxxed, and not be in vain.
Got the vac 14 days after it was avail to me (Score:2)
Each case is another chance for variants to appear (Score:5, Informative)
At this point, as tempting as it is to say "let Darwin sort it all out" and hope that the unvax'd people die and "decrease the surplus population" to quote Scrooge, the reality is that variants appear from new cases. Each time the virus infects someone is another approximately 10^10 chances for a mutation. Eventually worse variants will occur, so the fewer people get sick, the lower the chance that a vaccine-breakout variant will occur.
So far, we've been pretty lucky that the variants have not proven to be very good at beating the current vaccines. But that luck could run out at any time.
So from my perspective, as much as I'd love to just say "Told ya so; it's your own dumb fault you got sick" the reality is that they're endangering the rest of us too.
Masks not required (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a similar case during a maintenance visit at a chemical plant recently. Me and 3 fuckwits working in a confined space. "Masks are not mandatory here, you don't need to wear them". I think I heard that maybe 20 times in the one damn shift. Yeah I don't "need" to wear them. Wore it anyway. Fast forward 2 days I get an after hours call from HSSE telling me I need to get my arse to the testing centre because the 3 fuckwits tested positive for COVID. I tested negative.
Fortunately they were only home sick, not hospitalised. I don't wish ill on people, even the dumb fuckwits. Interestingly 3 weeks later I worked with 2 of them on another machine and they were wearing masks, so at least they learnt something. And fortunately everyone is now at least partially vaccinated.
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I'm getting sick of this stupid "it only saves other people" meme. Just because they predominantly stop the spread of spittle doesn't mean they don't also filter incoming air, stop people from touching their own mouth, or licking themselves. Even your silly face fitted and fit tested comparison should tell you how stupid your binary 1 and 0 comparison is because even they come with different ratings depending on the specific design of the respirator.
The reality is medical masks are not made of plastic and d
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupidity is not a death penalty offense.
IMHO you're incorrect to think that.
There are many times that stupidity is fatal. If it wasn't, we wouldn't have the Darwin Awards.
Almost every COVID-19 death now is easily preventable. That is what we should have learned from this story, but of course, in Florida, learning is outlawed and so is requiring vaccinations or simple pandemic procedures like masks and social distancing.
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Any adult in the US can get vaccinated for free. Make Darwin Great Again.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
A bunch of Aussies are reading this in confusion, wondering when Darwin was ever great.
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Gallipoli? Ha! Wait until you learn about Singapore.
The fall of Singapore? Not much of a story because unlike Gallipoli there was no real battle. But people are certainly aware of it, and Changi prison.
That's the moment when we learned we could not rely on the British to save us. Coral Sea and the Kokoda trail make much better stories, as does the defeat at Gallipoli.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless they're allergic. Or, like my cousin in the states, immunocompromised (vaccinated but no measurable antibody levels and probably little if any protection). Or kids, whose parents have Long COVID concerns.
But here's what may well happen with Delta. It should be able to spread like wildfire almost everywhere in the US. The red states and maybe even some blue states will decide that there's no political will to take action to stop the spread, since "anyone can get vaccinated". So they just let it burn itself out with no controls whatsoever - establishing herd immunity via infecting the herd. Death rate per case is significantly down thanks to vaccination, but total cases are significantly up, offsetting this. Delta would spread primarily through children and the unvaccinated, and to a lesser extent the undervaccinated, and asymptomatic cases from the fully vaccinated (half of diagnosed cases in Israel's new wave are fully vaccinated 2x Pfizer... not clear how well they're spreading the disease, though). Without any attempt to control the disease, cases would become be so numerous that even breakthrough infection counts become sizable. Apart from the unvaxxed and a small percentage of the vaxxed who die, 10% or more of the infected end up with one or more long COVID symptoms. The large number of cases in partially and fully vaxxed people (due to the huge reservoir of uncontrolled disease around them) functions as a mutation breeding ground.
I hope this isn't what happens, mind you. But I just don't see the political will in red states, and maybe even some blue states, to do anything. Most developed countries have reached herd immunity against other strains, but only small locales have it against Delta; kids and more of the unvaccinated (esp. in antivax-areas) need to either get vaxxed or infected. And the latter opens up mutation opportunities for something else to come afterwards.
Whether you worry about spike proteins or not, if you haven't already, odds are you'll be getting them in your body sooner or later this summer - whether by vaccine or by virus.
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Most developed countries have reached herd immunity against other strains
Huh? I'm in a developed country, just saw some research comparing teachers to the general population when it comes to Covid antibodies. They were both around 2.3%, which even with the 25% of fully vaccinated is a long way from herd immunity. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-stud... [ctvnews.ca]
Seems only the UK variant gives good immunity to the Delta variant as well for those previously infected.
At that herd immunity against the Delta variant might be unattainable unless little kids can get vaccinated as it seems to need clos
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Judgmental (Score:2, Interesting)
Being judgmental is a thing on Slashdot.
The other thing is if this vaccine is effective, making a bad choice to not get vaccinated shouldn't be a problem?
If the vaccine is partially effective, I want to learn more about what I can and cannot do. Even if one doesn't die, getting very sick is a concern, especially with the long-term effects.
The "lol"s and the exclamation points and the scolding of people we haven't even met and don't know all of the circumstances isn't helpful to that end.
News for N
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The other thing is if this vaccine is effective, making a bad choice to not get vaccinated shouldn't be a problem?
It is effective in people who have been vaccinated. When only 44% of your state (Florida) is fully vaccinated, however, it is completely ineffective at protecting people who have not been vaccinated. For COVID, folks are saying that protection for the unvaccinated starts somewhere around 60% to 70% vaccinated. And that's if it were perfectly effective. For every percent below 100% effectiveness, add a bit to the number of people who have to be vaccinated. For some strains, it may be less than 90% effec
Re: Judgmental (Score:5, Insightful)
The vaccine is not experimental. It's authorized for emergency use, and applications are already in for approved.
Enjoy your fake science and sophism now because it will be approved in a few months as the data are fully checked by the FDA.
Calling it "experimental" is one of the lamest fake news things I've ever seen on a science forum. You don't belong here with stupidity like that.
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This isn't experimental in reality. The tech developing this vaccine has been around since the first SARS outbreak, what, two decades ago?
Might help if you actually knew a fucking thing about medicine before spouting off.
The tech has been around since the late 1980s. It has been used safely for over a decade. The only thing new is the payload. That's not minor, to be fair, but after approximately 2 Billion doses, this is about as experimental as McDonald's burgers were in the mid-1960s.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupidity is not a death penalty offense. Listening to the wrong people is not a death penalty offense. Being uneducated is not a death penalty offense.
You or I don't get to decide that. Reality gets to decide that.
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As always, what you should do depends on the consequences you're willing to accept.
Expert opinion mostly supports the idea that vaccinated people can associate with each other without any special precautions, but there *are* corner cases. If you have someone at home who is being treated for cancer and is therefore immunocompromised, you might choose to wear a mask with other vaccinated people to protect that family member.
And, if you're a decent human being, you will wear masks around other vaccinated peop
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Stupidity is not a death penalty offense. Listening to the wrong people is not a death penalty offense. Being uneducated is not a death penalty offense.
It is natural consequence so it might as well be an offense against nature. If you want to say nature is wrong then feel free to try and fight it.
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You mean they "should not" be death penalty offenses, but very often they end up being so.
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Stupidity is not a death penalty offense. Listening to the wrong people is not a death penalty offense. Being uneducated is not a death penalty offense.
However, freedom comes with the requirement of personal responsibility and consequences. While marching everyone at gunpoint to get vaccinated would prevent some deaths, I have to ask myself, would I want the government to force me to do everything "correctly" (what is "correct" being defined by the government of course)? No, I wouldn't.
So, while I do not advocate shooting the antivaxxers, if they die as a consequence of their own (in)actions, I do not care. And it's not just being uneducated - it's being u
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about the overworked, over stressed healthcare workers who have to deal with these assholes?
"Sir, we know that you did not trust the vaccine and chose to not get it, even though it was available for you. We are sorry to inform you that any care you would receive in this hospital would be based on the same lies and conspiracies that the vaccine is based on, so we cannot, in good conscience, accept you and force you to be injected with chemicals. You should find a witch-doctor or a priest, depending on your beliefs. You can also find a private doctor and pay him for the chemicals and microchips. We respect your freedom to die. Good bye".
If only one antivaxxer was refused treatment like that, I think quite a lot of them would trample each other running to the vaccine center.
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It hasn't been supply issues in this part of the US for months. Every pharmacy has vaccine. Most are now doing walk-ins, you show up and ask for the vaccine, you get it right then, no appointment needed. Three months ago it took a bit of effort for me to schedule my vaccine, but if I wanted to get one today I could have it in less than an hour just by showing up at the grocery store.
No, supply is not the problem here any more. Morons are. Less than 50% of my county is vaccinated, despite the vaccine be
Re: Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:2)
Apparently they can be a death sentence, so says nature.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupidity is not a death penalty offense.
What "penalty" is that? Who's penalizing whom? I think calling the death of the people in the article a "death penalty" is not only faulty logic, but also injects unnecessarily emotional terms in the discussion.
This is not a penalty. Nobody sentenced those people to death. They made their choices and this is the natural result. People have the freedom to choose, which means bad choices will sometimes happen, and they will cause pain, distress or death. This is to be expected, and I think it's a price worth paying for maintaining freedom.
Now, what I believe you mean is that since they died, they shouldn't be harshly judged - as the OP does, when he grants them Darwin awards. I disagree. I feel sorry that they died, but it's only in John Donne's general sense that no man is an island, and any man's death diminishes us all. But they - and others like them should be harshly judged. Yes, they died; but they very probably died because of their own stupidity. There's a very strong probability that their deaths could have been avoided, but it's their actions (or, in this case non-actions) that left them vulnerable. They had plenty of information available, they had plenty of time to act, there was no dearth of vaccine if they wanted to get the shot. They choose their path, with completely predictable results. I feel less sorry about their death than about the death of a suicide, who explicitly decided to end his life - which means his life must have been terrible. However, those stupid people didn't only endanger their own lives. They also put others - people who can't get a vaccine for various reasons - at risk. So yes, they do need to be harshly judged.
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But virtually every sentence in your post is wrong. Simply because of the world we were born into:
1. Stupidity is very, very frequently a death sentence. Either from some immediate form of death catalyzed by a person's idiocy, or slowly because they abuse themselves and lose decades of their life as a result. Stupidity is certainly one of the top 10 causes
Re: Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:3)
This is ignorant. The use of the term âoejabâ demonstrates you spend too much time watching cable news.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
They are *literally* killing us with covid. .. I think that alone is a death penalty offence.
So if it gets proven that covid came from a lab in China, are in you favor or either going to war or killing everyone in the lab?
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm, there hasn't been a polio case in the United States since 1979. So, yeah, the real crime here is not understanding that "if they just took the jab" is the solution.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who said anything about caring about the United States. The only point here is that the United States deployed a comprehensive vaccination program, which, of course, worked well, since vaccination is the only effective solution. This is also true of smallpox.
But, since you said something stupid, here we go. Wild polio cases have been limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2016, both countries with a well-known problem with anti-vaxxers. It helps when you know the history of what you're talking about. Get your jab, dumbo.
Polio [Re:Darwin Awards, anyone?] (Score:2)
...Wild polio cases have been limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2016,
And Africa. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/... [go.com]
both countries with a well-known problem with anti-vaxxers.
That may be true in general, but in the case of polio, turns out that the current resurgence is due to the vaccine, not due to not getting the vaccine.
https://www.contagionlive.com/... [contagionlive.com]
It helps when you know the history of what you're talking about.
Re:Polio [Re:Darwin Awards, anyone?] (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, anti-vaxxers over there are really quite [cp24.com] murderous. [aljazeera.com]
The few remaining cases in Africa are vaccine-derived, but ironically the solution to this is more vaccination (herd immunity).
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Polio [Re:Darwin Awards, anyone?] (Score:5, Informative)
...Wild polio cases have been limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2016,
And Africa. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/... [go.com]
both countries with a well-known problem with anti-vaxxers.
That may be true in general, but in the case of polio, turns out that the current resurgence is due to the vaccine, not due to not getting the vaccine. https://www.contagionlive.com/... [contagionlive.com]
It helps when you know the history of what you're talking about.
Actually, according to the article you referenced the problem is low vaccination rates as it states in the preface:
Low vaccination coverage contributed to a sharp rise in the number of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks worldwide from January 2018 to June 2019, according to the CDC.
and goes on in the body of the article:
cVDPV is extremely rare and occurs when routine or supplementary immunization activities (SIAs) are poorly conducted and a population is left susceptible to poliovirus, whether from vaccine-derived or wild poliovirus,” Jorba said. “Hence, the problem is not with the vaccine itself, but low vaccination coverage. If a population is fully immunized, they will be protected against both vaccine-derived and wild polioviruses.”
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However, there really is no reason to be rude to others when trying to correct them. There are plenty of AC trolls that are allowed here that will correct things that are wrong or just flat our lie about them. No sense adding to their actions.
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“cVDPV is extremely rare and occurs when routine or supplementary immunization activities (SIAs) are poorly conducted and a population is left susceptible to poliovirus, whether from vaccine-derived or wild poliovirus,”
The actions of anti-vaxxers are why immunization activities are poorly conducted and a population is left susceptible. In places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and Africa, the anit-vaxxers attack, threaten to kill, and kill those providing the vaccine as well as claiming that the vaccine will make people sterile or simply kill them.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Wild polio cases have been limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2016, both countries with a well-known problem with anti-vaxxers.
Worth mentioning that they are anti-vaxxers partly because in those countries, the people who give vaccines are literally assassins at times.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quit changing the subject you asshole.... Polio HAS BEEN ERADICATED FROM THE US BECAUSE OF VACCINES PERIOD. By definition if it's been 40 years since someone's gotten sick then it's its gone. Every virus mutates ... but surprise people who are fully vaccinated for COVID, if they do get catch a variant, they get a very mild version. They don't die. Vaccines are real, science is real... get over it. I don't want anyone to die, however have I little sympathy for the folks who refuse to get it because of 'political reasons' and then die. If your are going to put a gun to head with a bullet in it and keep pulling the trigger, you shouldn't be shocked when the last thing you see is your brains splattered on the wall.
Re: Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:3)
In the UK the Delta variant has killed doubled jabbed with AZ, Pfizer and Moderna.
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We can't even eradicate polio from the planet, and we've had that vaccine for fifty fucking years.
To be fair, there are only two countries on the planet where wild poliovirus still occurs: Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's within the margin of error.
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We can't even eradicate polio from the planet, and we've had that vaccine for fifty fucking years.
To be fair, there are only two countries on the planet where wild poliovirus still occurs: Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's within the margin of error.
Is this also within the margin of error?
Despite eradication ten years earlier, an outbreak was confirmed in China in September 2011, involving a strain common in Pakistan..
In April 2012, the World Health Assembly declared that the failure to completely eradicate polio would be a programmatic emergency for global public health, and that it "must not happen."
Oh, and then there's this joyous news; that the damn vaccine is now more harmful than the disease, so now we logically should become anti-vaxx against polio:
Circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus cases have exceeded wild-type cases, making it desirable to discontinue the use of the oral polio vaccine as soon as safely possible
Gee, can't imagine how that will work out after a few years of polio "no-vaxxers" spread through the population, and we experience another outbreak.
Guess we'll see if a virus that caused a global pandemic and lockdown manages to make it on the global eradication program. At this rate I doubt it, so prepare for a
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and then there's this joyous news; that the damn vaccine is now more harmful than the disease, so now we logically should become anti-vaxx against polio:
Circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus cases have exceeded wild-type cases, making it desirable to discontinue the use of the oral polio vaccine as soon as safely possible
Gee, can't imagine how that will work out after a few years of polio "no-vaxxers" spread through the population, and we experience another outbreak.
Vaccine-derived infections are only a concern with the oral vaccine as it uses a more potent attenuated live virus formulation. The injected vaccine does not have this issue. The benefit of the oral vaccine is that it is easier to administer and is only supposed to be used in areas where the risk of endemic infection outweighs the risk of the vaccine itself.
Secondary infection derived from the oral vaccine does not affect the recipient either (only 3/million vaccinations result in primary infections) - it is caused by a somewhat rare reversion to full potency in the virus excreted by the vaccinated individual in the days following vaccination. This is mostly a concern in places with poor sanitation AND poor vaccine coverage.
Therefore it is dangerous to administer the oral vaccine haphazardly in these areas as it can do more harm than good: the unvaccinated majority can be put at risk from contaminated water from the vaccinated minority. Instead, you would to either fix their plumbing and then roll out the vaccine gradually, or go on a vaccine blitz and try to get at least an initial does into everyone in say, a single village, all at once.
People in areas with a more built up healthcare infrastructure will have access to the perfectly safe injected vaccine should another global polio pandemic arise.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
We can't even eradicate polio from the planet, and we've had that vaccine for fifty fucking years.
To be fair, there are only two countries on the planet where wild poliovirus still occurs: Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's within the margin of error.
Is this also within the margin of error?
Despite eradication ten years earlier, an outbreak was confirmed in China in September 2011, involving a strain common in Pakistan..
Yes, it really is. You’ll notice that it was quickly re-eradicated.
In April 2012, the World Health Assembly declared that the failure to completely eradicate polio would be a programmatic emergency for global public health, and that it "must not happen."
Oh, and then there's this joyous news; that the damn vaccine is now more harmful than the disease, so now we logically should become anti-vaxx against polio:
Circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus cases have exceeded wild-type cases, making it desirable to discontinue the use of the oral polio vaccine as soon as safely possible
Yup. That’s what happens when you bomb countries into third-world status so that they have poor sanitation. You end up with diseases from other people’s feces.
Gee, can't imagine how that will work out after a few years of polio "no-vaxxers" spread through the population, and we experience another outbreak.
Guess we'll see if a virus that caused a global pandemic and lockdown manages to make it on the global eradication program. At this rate I doubt it, so prepare for a century of COVID mutations-for-profit; if we survive it long enough to keep up.
It’s a good thing that modern vaccines aren’t based on attenuated live viruses. So those sorts of problems can’t happen with the COVID vaccine.
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Your username is incredibly offensive. It's 2021 and we're still excluding girls from tech-related circles? Unbelievable.
Re: Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell that to folks who are immunocompromised or under age 12.
Antivaxxers dying is cold comfort to the families of folks the antivaxxers helped infect.
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Here's the Darwin part: "But even with the outbreak, masks will remain optional for staffers returning this week". Give me freedom from mask wearing or give me death! I swear, a company and government can require that you don't walk around naked in public, but being asked to wear a mask is suddenly a critical invasion of freedumbs?
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At most a small percentage will die. 10-30% of the rest will continue burning through health care resources with long COVID, they may kill my friends (four at least) on immune-suppressing drugs, and all along they will be providing the virus with free natural gain of function experiments.
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I'd say let's let the unvaxed just die off. Give it one to three years, and we can say I TOLD YOU SO when they are all dead and we are healthy as hay.
Sounds good tap dancing on other graves, till you realize the one's "healthy as hay" live in the middle of a megadrought [youtu.be] or infrastructue is collapsing [youtu.be] around them. And that smugness has only bought a fool's comfort.
Darwin not involved [Re:Darwin Awards, anyone?] (Score:2)
I'd say let's let the unvaxed just die off. Give it one to three years...
COVID-19 tends to kill mostly people above reproduction age, so it has nothing to do with Darwin.
What it does tend to do, however, is make people very sick, racking up expensive medical bills (which society pays when the sick people go bankrupt).
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I'd say let's let the unvaxed just die off. Give it one to three years...
COVID-19 tends to kill mostly people above reproduction age, so it has nothing to do with Darwin.
Darwinian evolution need not require preventing reproduction. Most of the anti-vaxxers are not idiots. They’re just inadequately educated. And removing them from the voting pool would change the percentage of voters who value education, thus reducing the percentage of uneducated people in the next generation. So it isn’t reproductive age that matters when talking about how those deaths will impact the next generation, but rather voting age.
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As much as I find Anti-Vaxers and many other groups who base an ideology around ignoring facts and science, to be extremely stupid and I would like them to finally wake up one day and realize how stupid they are, and many of the politicians who find these stupid people and play to their stupidity to push their own power agenda, to be the scum of the earth. Nearly every person I have met, are actually a more of some ideology. As well as nearly every ideology has gaps in it, where people have their own opini
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That website looks totally legit.
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
That website looks totally legit.
It's where Tom Brady gets all his footballs.
Re: Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
You really need better news sources.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
https://news.yahoo.com/reveale... [yahoo.com]
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Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
This is a total fabrication. Here's what Public Health England actually says about the delta variant [www.gov.uk]
Re:Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Notice anything strange here? Delta variant deaths: [patriots.win] 117 Total Deaths 44 Unvaccinated 23 Single Dose 50 Fully Vaccinated
From the BBC [bbc.com], 73 deaths:
Now compare to the adult population:
So deaths are about 2.5x as high per capita for unvaccinated people as for vaccinated people. That puts the vaccine's effectiveness at only 60%, which is alarming, but then again, I'd expect a large percentage of Britain's vaccinations to have been with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which has lower effectiveness against all variants, so that isn't nearly as alarming as it would be if those numbers were from the U.S., where vector-based vaccines are relatively rare.
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unvaccinated:: 47/18 = 2,61
one dose: 14/22 = 0,64
fully vaccinated: 36/59 = 0,61
So I would conclude, that unvaccinated people have a 4,3 times higher risk to die from Covid-19 (2,61/0,61) than vaccinated people.
As Astrazeneca has an efficacy of about 60%, that is even higher than the expected 2,5 times.
Still Moderna or BioNTech have an efficacy of about 95%, which would result in 20 times more victims among unvaccinated people.
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~Proud and Fearless Patriot Warriors~ until their invisible slashdot internet points are at stake.
Re: Darwin Awards, anyone? (Score:3)
Re: Must be sadomasochists (Score:3)
Or be in a GOP state where they've been intentionally waffling the rollout. Some unvaccinated folks are victims too and don't have access. Maybe they're in remote rural areas. Maybe the state government isn't bothering to aggressively notify of vaccination options. Maybe they've been falling prey to rampant misinformation and scare tactics.
The anti-science pride a lot of America subscribes to is having serious consequences again and again.
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âoeThere is a cult of ignorance in the U
Re:Must be sadomasochists (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of mine who's a pretty reasonable guy and not an antivaxxer chose to remain unvaccinated even though our cohort could've gotten it a month ago.
I asked him about it and he was like "I'd like to have more information about it. If I talk to one group, they tell me I'm an idiot and shold get vaccinated asap. The other group says I'm an idiot for considering it. So what am I supposed to do".
???
What more information do you need? The two groups aren't equally informed and/or sane. The vaccine has been shown to be very safe and effective and covid can fuck up even relatively young people pretty badly. I mean it's possible there's some unforseen complication 20 years later but the same is true of covid, in fact it's worse because we know it can do long-term damage.
Re:Must be sadomasochists (Score:5, Insightful)
My answer would be simple: "Ask your doctor. You, presumably, trust him in other medical topics, why not this one?".
I am not a doctor and not a pharmacy expert. I kind-of know the simplified version of how vaccines are supposed to work, but I would not know the difference between, say, the different covid vaccines (and in my country you have to choose the manufacturer). However, I do trust the EU agencies about medicine and other vaccines - if my doctor prescribes me some medicine and, obviously, that medicine is approved by the EU, then it means it's good enough. While those people could make mistakes, they sure as hell know better than me or some random guy on the internet. Or even someone I personally know who is not a doctor.
This is what's strange to me about the anti-vaxxers. They shout loudly how vaccines (not just covid) are bad, so, it stands to reason, that they believe the doctors, who say that vaccines are good, are lying. OK, then why when such a person gets sick or injured, he goes to a doctor? They are all lying and want to kill you, remember? Go to a shaman or a priest...
The most reasonable of the anti-vaxxers are the ones who say "Covid vaccines are not completely tested, like the other ones, so I do not trust them". OK, that makes sense, but then don't cry if you get covid and suffer worse consequences.
Re:Must be sadomasochists (Score:4, Insightful)
but ultimately you need to decide for yourself what you think is best. Don't take anything they say on "faith", research, learn and make informed decisions.
That would require me to go to medical school. And no, I cannot "research" something if I do not have enough base knowledge to understand what makes sense and what doesn't. I am definitely not going to question the doctor's decision to prescribe me certain medicine over some other medicine.
And yes, if I get sick, I go to the doctor and do what she tells me to do. If she prescribes me medicine X, I am not going to debate with her on why it should be and not Y, because I read somewhere on the internet that Y is somehow better.
If it's a field where I have some base knowledge, I can have a proper discussion with the expert or even research and do it myself. Just like I do not expect an accountant to "research" which Linux distribution he should use on his server.
Is he thinking "1.0 product"? (Score:2)
If it's a reasoned concern like that, you could point out that safely injecting humans with mRNA vaccines goes back to 2008, that these vaccines's research has roots in the days of SARS Classic, and that if anything goes wrong with vaccines it's in the first days or weeks.
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>mRNA vaccines did not exist in 2008
Here's my citation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
It was a cancer vaccine. The trial did not prove effectiveness but it was safe.
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We've seen permanent damage in people who were infected but not killed. Those are the long term effects the GP referred to.
Please kill yourself to spare us your willful ignorance.
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> Until I hear Fauci admit to his many many many many many mistakes on COVID
If you believe this, you're an absolute fucking imbecile.
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You were doing fine until this line. Even a child can tell that this line is utter BS. And that's the problem. You are making claims that you can't possibly know (and it is obvious to the reader this is so). COVID-19 is less than two years old, so how would you know what its long term effect are?
You are completely misrepresenting what he said. He did not say "we know all the long term effects." He said: "I mean it's possible there's some unforseen complication 20 years later but the same is true of covid, in fact it's worse because we know it can do long-term damage." which means we already have cases where there has been permanent damage to people due to CoVID.
Nobody believes them anymore, mostly because they over-promise and we know they will fall short (also they were wrong about almost everythi
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Re:Must be sadomasochists (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Must be sadomasochists (Score:5, Informative)
A simpler version: "I'm too stupid to understand."
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Then get COVID and die already.
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It is morally acceptable to torture you to death.
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Not only do you get vaccinated for yourself, but you get vaccinated for the people you care about so that the virus has no where left to spread.
As an American, who like you believes in our right to choose and be free, all I can do is encourage you to help us end this pandemic.
As a front line worker I have had the displeasure of seeing COVID kill and torture for the past year. This is only Round #1. Thanks to President Trump's Operation Warp Speed America has had the privilege to get vaccinated with an mR
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Not only do you get vaccinated for yourself, but you get vaccinated for the people you care about so that the virus has no where left to spread.
Not only. If you take up an ICU bed, you will cause some urgently needed surgeries to be shifted with worse outcomes and risk of people dying before surgery. As COVID patients tend to stay very long in the ICU, that is not a minor concern. Also, if you cannot pay for that treatment, society will eventually have to pick up the cost.
Not getting vaccinated is an utterly anti-social act.
Re:Face Masks are useless against Delta (Score:5, Insightful)
Or it was because India loosened their restrictions around the same time: Why India's Second COVID Surge Is So Much Worse Than the First [scientificamerican.com]
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Hopes also said:
"Individual employees in the IT Department who were known to be fully vaccinated and who were in close proximity of those who were infected did not contract COVID-19."
and
"six unvaccinated employees, including five in the IT department, tested positive for the virus"
Not a valid study, but he also wasn't basing his statement on "this particular situation demonstrating" on just the 23 year old.
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" This is an instance of correlation does not equate to causation"
No, it's an instance of trying to undefine a correlation by insisting that the data points be taken one at a time.
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Perhaps this single anecdote satisfies his belief system
Your agenda is showing.