PhineasC

Stop thinking about this like the smallpox or polio vaccine campaigns. It’s more like a campaign to end the flu using the flu vaccine. Not going to work. Only end to this is we the people deciding it’s over. Otherwise, you end up like Australia and China.

It doesn’t even matter if the deaths average 20k or 100k. Doesn’t change the point.

The flu numbers from the CDC are guesses, unlike the COVID numbers (supposedly). It hardly matters though. How do you keep everyone on the planet vaxxed every six months forever? Just play it out in your head. It makes no sense. We will need to learn to accept tens of thousands of COVID deaths here and up to a million worldwide. We don’t need to vaccinate everyone forever to hit those numbers.

How many deaths per year are acceptable for COVID? 20k? 50k? 100k?

Flu definitely kills at least 50k a year. A lot of pneumonia and ARDS cases in the elderly start as the flu. They are just not called flu deaths. The CDC has admitted for years their flu numbers are total guesses. You see these little spikes in some years when they are tracking a novel new variant more closely, like swine flu.

There is a thread on this very board where people of the same exact social and political persuasion are taking bets on which one of us will die first.

So far most northern states have held off on major restrictions. It can be argued they are working them through businesses instead. It’s also not respiratory illness season there. We will see what November looks like. Probably much uglier.

LOL OK, so how do you plan to vaccinate the world every six months forever? Pay Pfizer $80T and hope it works out? Flu still kills 50-80k a year here, at least (it's definitely more). We OK with that for COVID?

0.02% death rate. Basically flu. I posted it a few times here.

It could be. That is not what is happening in other countries with high vaccination rates, though. It's also not what is happening in certain locales in this country with relatively high vaccination uptake. I see very little evidence any public policy decisions to reinstate masks and restrictions are being made based on deaths. It's all cases. I'm just not able to be so optimistic that mass worldwide vaccination is going to end this. Much more likely it ends as the virus mutates to become weaker and fades into the background with the rest of the respiratory viruses we deal with. That's already occurring.

Seems not everyone agrees: https://boston.cbslocal.com/2021/08/06/face-masks-schools-massachusetts-spilka-baker-requirement/

You guys also seem to making a huge assumption about future vaccine efficacy (which keeps declining -- for Pfizer at least) and the likelihood of getting the rest of the world vaccinated. It is also debatable how many people in this country will get the booster or even bother getting vaccinated again next year. There is a reason officials in Iceland and Australia both recently admitted that vaccines alone cannot achieve herd immunity or end the case spiral.

That hasn't been the case in the rest of the western world and most of Asia, but maybe the US will buck the trend again somehow.

The government needs to do more than simply provide better "messaging." They need to say masks are not required for the vaccinated, period. It's doesn't make sense to most people when the government says, "Vaccines work extremely well and prevent death, but vaccinated people need to mask up to stay safe."

Because this is not what is happening in other countries that are well-vaccinated. They have all started locking down over cases, not deaths. Seriously, just read the news. Every day it's another country saying vaccines will not achieve the "zero COVID" goals. It might be different here, we will see.

We are not seeing the restrictions end in countries such as Israel. They are ramping them back up over cases. It could end up being different here, but in reality we seem to just be following behind these other countries as we approach fall.

At some unachievable panacea level where the world is fully vaccinated with boosters every six months, yes. This is not a sterilizing vaccine that makes you immune for life. It's already showing signs of being like the flu vaccine.

Big hedge funds and banks are buying up tons of property and then renting it out. There is a big push to turn America into a country of renters with a handful of large, government-backed landlords. Smaller landlords have to go in that scenario.

Freaking latest iPhone update bricked my phone.

You are refusing to see the next logical conclusion that comes from that. If the vaccinated can still spread the virus, how does force-vaxxing the universe end the casedemic?

I don't really believe any of you actually care about some fat idiot in LA dying because he refused the vaccine. That's not what this is about at all. Those guys were at risk in April as well and no one cared.

Medical professionals need to get the vaccine because they work closely with sick and vulnerable people. That's part of the job.

It has to be getting hard for the diehard "just force-vax everyone to end this" people to be ignoring the growing evidence that the narrative has collapsed. We aren't vaccinating our way out of a zero-COVID policy.

In the UK, only 45 people under the age of 50 died from Delta. The man on the TV is SE Mass is probably not mentioning that little stat.

Yep, the CDC guidelines and guidance from the WH carry a lot of weight because they provide top cover. This also makes it riskier as a high-profile business or organization to go against the grain. The headline would say: "Major MA lab flouts CDC guidelines and pays the price with local COVID outbreak." That's why I am just shaking my head at people who think the CDC is making the right call or that higher vaccination rates will magically fix this mentality.