Nobel Prize for Covid vaccine inventors!

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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Antibiotics almost definitely have saved more lives overall. Until they were invented, other illnesses/injuries would kill you rapidly … not always due to the injury/illness, but very often because of the associated infection and susceptibility to infection.

But they say that the medical innovation that really saved the most lives was regular hand washing before caring for patients.

A few years back, I did COVID, Shingrix, and Flu shots all roughly at the same time. They told me that I need to wait at least 2 weeks between COVID and Shingrix so I waited exactly 2 weeks between them. For flu shot, they said it doesn’t matter. Shingrix is also a 2-shot sequence with 2 to 6 months between each of them, so I did it at exactly 4 months between the two doses.

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Typically of medical studies the recommendations have been shuffled.

I do believe getting them at the same time in the same arm is better for an immune response.

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The bits and pieces on this that’ve drifted my way seem to state that there’s no significant drop in response…which itself suggests that there might be questions on whether concurrent vaccination could actually reduce efficacy.

There’s a bit of irony in the various and varying suggestions for spacing out the vaccines, though. It’s almost as if there’s a bit of pandering to the anti vaxxers’ idea of Precautionary Principle. For the past couple of decades, the idea of “Too many, too soon” has been a popular squawk on the topic of childhood vaccination (any Olde Tymers from the H&N and Alt Med boards will recall this popular sentiment…at least, going by the number of “recs” such comments received) Extensive study unequivocally supports the safety and efficacy of utilizing multiple vaccines in immunisation programs.

So, I guess my take is, if such a vaccine regimen was considered the right thing for my daughter … and even more so my granddaughter … why not for me?

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This news is timely, because I am fighting off a SIL who has gone down the rabbit hole. We have another SIL who just finished dealing with oral cancer, seems fine, the evil SIL sends this around:

> Subject: No ifs or buts any longer. All mRNA vaccines must be halted and banned now." Angus Dalgleish.

Who is Angus Dalgleish? A Professor of Oncology at St., George’s Medical School in London. And he has crafted some cockamamie nonsense here:

…which bad SIL is now fulminating about to anyone who will listen.

I wrote this reply - to both SILs:

OK, I read the article and have the following thoughts:

He wrote it almost a year ago (earliest news story I can find: November 2022), and since then not a single other doctor has signed on, including the anonymous ones he says “have contacted him from all over” about the same thing happening. If this were real you might guess he would name them, or they would name themselves. They haven’t. Weird.

I’m sure there isn’t a single oncologist on the planet who hasn’t had a patient “recur” their cancer, probably most have seen it dozens, even hundreds of times. There are well over 2 million oncologists on Earth (maybe double; I stopped counting at 2 million: [Global Survey of Clinical Oncology Workforce - PMC] and I would think at least a few would have recognized the same pattern over the last 11 months. Nobody has.

A base scientific truism is that “correlation does not prove causation”. I’ll bet a lot of recurrences occur after cancer patients eat a peanut butter sandwich, but that doesn’t mean the sandwich caused the recurrence. (Feel free to substitute: aspirin, anesthesia, scuba diving, back operation, vaccine or anything else for the sandwich; it’s still true.) To find causation you need dozens - even hundreds - of corroborating pieces of evidence, preferably in a randomized, controlled study, peer-reviewed and analyzed by others in the field, not a few “anecdotes” which may or may not be relevant.

I am a little bothered by his used of the words “who have been forced to have a Covid booster”. This is the kind of language used by vaccine deniers, and nobody has been “forced” to get a booster shot; medical excuses have been allowed for nearly any normal activity including flying.

So, I must say I am unconvinced (to put it mildly.) If his idea was true it would be headline news around the globe. Studies would have been launched, scientific papers printed in peer-reviewed journals, researchers would be basking in their new-found fame, being interviewed on television and celebrated by others in their industry. They’re not, obviously, and all I can conclude is that this one guy has a crack-pottery theory which nobody else except, you know, Twitter, has picked up - but what do I know? I’m not one of the 650,000 oncologists in North America, or even the 150,000 or so in the UK. I guess they’re all busy telling him to “shush” and go back and mind his play toys, because they have better things to do?

Even well respected people can turn out to be, well, “off”. Look at Robert F. Kennedy, once respected environmental lawyer, now crackpot politician. It happens.

Love,

Me.

I almost hesitate to put this here for fear of giving the looney-tooner (and I use the term with much love and affection) more publicity, but I have faith that folks hereabouts are unlikely to chase rabbits - or anything else - down the infinity hole. At least I hope.

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Loony tooner indeed. It’s enough to make a person wonder if he has a financial stake in alternative vaccine manufacture :thinking:…

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Goofy,

My first post here was worthless.

I am switching it out for a story one why vaccines matter.

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I’m one of those folk who can never resist a rabbit hole, Goofy…especially when it’s chasing “alternative thinkers”, dissenters, denialists, crackpots and others of that ilk. Especially when they’re touting an Appeal to Authority and seemingly meaningful credentials … Andrew Wakefield, Peter Duesberg to name but two whose “outside-the-box” thinking and popularity in social media circles and beyond has caused untold harm.

In checking him out on Google, his name is all over the place … but in the Usual Places for general nitwittery like Twitter as was, Express, Telegraph, MailOnline etc … so I couldn’t understand why he’d escaped my Steatorrhea Detector. Must’ve been a moment of inattention on my part because I eventually stumbled across mention of him in an article on the lab leak origin of Covid conspiracy theory (turns out he also has a book out on the hidden truths behind Covid’s origins)…

A long read and, unfortunately, not something that would reassure your SIL beyond anything your excellent explanation to her provided because you can’t unring that bell of suspicion.

Just to reassure myself, though, I contacted my friends with a take on the topic…my two besties back in England who were my roomies back in dental school, one of whom is married to a head and neck oncologist so might be expected to have heard of someone who had anything worthwhile to say by way of noticing an increase in recurrence in “cancers”. Particularly of the head and neck, and beyond what might be accounted for by the disruption to normal business during those early days of the pandemic. They had not…not even in the context of Social Media Steatorrhea. So there you go…

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Sppankee’s proctologist report (finally declassified).

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Side story: the woman who was most directly responsible was 1) demeaned, 2) demoted, 3) ignored, and 4) disliked. Didn’t stop the University of Pennsylvania from making millions off the patents for mRNA that she developed. Some think she is owed an apology. Well - I guess!

Of course women have a long history of being ignored in science. The “Oppenheimer” movie had a chance to set the record straight. And blew it.

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Add Rosalind Franklin to the list.

James Watson is a nasty piece of work.

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The number of people in the US that have gotten this year’s covid shot so far is around seven million. That is only 2% of those eligible, quite low and about half of the number at this time last year.

Here’s How Many Americans Have Gotten Updated Vaccine Compared To Last Year’s Booster
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/covid-19-heres-how-many-americans-have-gotten-updated-vaccine-compared-to-last-years-booster/ar-AA1ia4hI
DB2

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Looking at the ease of getting my flu shot scheduled alongside Covid this year, I suspect a similar complacency there.

2020, it took 3 goes to get my Industrial Strength for Real Grown Ups flu shot…stuff was flying off the shelves within hours of each new delivery. Not supply chain issues per se but rather the previously complacent old wrinklies suddenly waking up to the fact that it might just be a life saver for them and showing up in droves.

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The anti-science campaign is starting to bear fruit.

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Yes. COVID did damage to the public health profession. Flu vaccination rates have slumped a little. although they are still above 50% and noticeably higher than 10 years ago.

National Flu Vaccination Rate Drops Across Every Age Group
https://www.valuepenguin.com/health-insurance-flu-vaccinations-study

DB2

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I think it did more damage to the million or so people who didn’t get vaccinated - and died - or the million more who got Long Covid. But apparently that doesn’t count in the anti-science circle.

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Covid is a coronavirus or in other words a cold virus.

Before Covid, no one got a cold vaccine. Medicine is doing better than ever.

As a kid, Dad once or twice told me a cold virus can kill you. He was thinking of the few outlying coronaviruses.

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Agreed. The rest was collateral damage.

DB2

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DB2

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Seems odd to grade it sooo early into the season. The updated booster just came out about a month ago. How many have received their flu vaccine by now?

I have little doubt that fewer people will get the booster than get their flu shot (roughly half get it annually) if for no other reason than the politics of it but as stated above, to measure success or failure this early seems odd.

Looks like the flu shot since July 1 has about 25% coverage for adults and 36% for seniors. Annual numbers are usually over 50% so quite a few more flu shots to give out - and it has been out for four months.

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