> Why have all the field hospitals been destroyed as fast as they were put up?
Take your pick from:
a) They were a bit of a PR gimmick? Better for gov't to be seen to do _something_ than standing around wringing your hands and hoping things will improve...?
b) They couldn't be staffed and equipped to provide appropriate and useful additional care?
c) General hospitals were perhaps not quite as close to being overwhelmed as was reported?
There were stories that German hospitals may have been slightly economical with the truth in terms of obtaining additional funding for ICU beds, which perhaps weren't needed or even ever created[0]
I think the argument is a fallacy in general. For people that keep making this argument: Stop beating around the bush and just come out and say you want zero covid at all costs.
We don't have enough doctors and nurses to staff the ICU beds bolted to the floors of the hospital.
Those field hospitals are surge capacity; and work with hurricanes and earthquakes where a single part of the country is affected. You can bring in volunteers and reservists from other areas to create capacity.
When the emergency is everywhere, and on-going, all of your surge capacity is gone.
The emergency has been everywhere and ongoing for almost 2 years now. At what point do they make an effort and the government says "Hey, let's permanently bolster our hospital systems. We'll hire X amount of 'surge' staff, create X amount of 'surge' beds".
But we don't do that. Instead we act surprised every time there's a surge, the media feeds off it and everyone starts infighting. I'm not convinced hospital capacity is really the problem people say it is.
IMO an even more important question is, why aren't we pursuing early outpatient treatment with combinations of existing over the counter medicines?
Such techniques have proven to be very effective at preventing hospitalization and death for SARS-CoV-2 [1][2], yet you will rarely find anyone advocating for them.
The papers I've cited are some of the most highly cited in the literature, with world-wide support from experts at top institutions who are actually treating COVID-19 patients.
These alternatives to vaccination are likely more palatable for the anti-vax crowd, and can help prevent over-utilization of precious medical resources.
> why aren't we pursuing early outpatient treatment with combinations of existing over the counter medicines
Doesn't this come back (yet again) to the financial incentives?
Go to FDA.gov and read up on "Emergency Use Authorization"[0]:
> FDA may authorize unapproved medical products or unapproved uses of approved medical products to be used in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions caused by CBRN threat agents when certain criteria are met, including there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.
If it were to turn out that an existing (possibly cheap? maybe even a generic?
) over-the-counter medicine is a good treatment for C19 then that would undercut the business plans of Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and co.
Asking "cui bono" has never been more appropriate.
> Assuming the worst-case scenario until proven otherwise doesn't work like that. You have to look at the entire range of uncertainty, and choose the worst-case scenario for each question.
It seems to me the worst case scenario is always applied when looking at things like natural immunity from prior infection, long covid, etc
If you model Sars-Cov-2 after Sars-Cov-1 or MERS then you would be lead to believe natural immunity lasts around 5+ years.
Where is worst case scenario not applied? Anything to do with vaccines. We're not even allowed to question it.
We are extremely conservative on one side of the coin, but not the other. Why?
And selection is useless if the “gene pool” is small enough that the selection pressure just eradicates the disease entirely. If we get the R number to something like ⅒ and hold it there for a few months? Disease eradicated, job done, everybody goes home.
Because lockdowns are detrimental to society (mental health, division, etc). Why can't we take a level headed approach. It seems like our approaches don't take into any consideration past experiences with similar viruses, or leverage data. We have a lot more data this time around.
You can distrust a car dealer and society will applaud you for doing what's right. If you say you're losing trust in something like an emergency use vaccination, then society will say you're a death cultist.
I wish anti-vaxxers stopped trying to insert themselves into every discussion. It is tiring.
We are talking about procurement of new vaccines and whether this additional shot is actually helping or whether this is due to the fact that Pfizer is going to benefit from this.
What we are not talking about is whether to vaccinate. The case on this is closed and all governments are working towards getting their populations vaccinated because without this they know it would be an either apocalyptic event or forever-dragging crippling restrictions.
The way I understand it is; you can't compare to mortality rates for other various things because these other various are spread out over a 12 month period. When there is a spike in Covid cases they all happen at the same time, which floods the health system and people die needlessly (e.g. not enough ventilators). People can get very ill (and die) from the flu as well but they don't tend to do this all at the same time (i.e. no spike) but get sick spread out over a longer period of time.
I'm all for the approach of not overwhelming healthcare. After the initial surge health care was not overwhelmed regardless of approaches to restrictions. Look at Florida vs California: They had same outcome with opposite approaches.
I can get a source in a bit. IIRC it was the spike protein that causes some (still unknown) response from the human body. The mRNA vaccine elicit a response from the immune system to reproduce the spike protein.
We have no idea that the spike protein causes long covid. It's much more likely that damage from the viral infection and immune response is at least an equal cause.
Beyond that, the virus causes orders of magnitude more spike protein response, so even if that was true, which it probably isn't, then it is still very unlikely that the vaccine could cause long-covid.
Also, all vaccines introduce spike proteins in the body, not just mRNA vaccines.
It appears to come from a researcher contacted by the site for the article. And it's probably true.
However, there's a few reasons to believe that "long" covid like symptoms wouldn't come from the spike protein alone:
1. As a parent mentioned, you generate a lot fewer proteins w/ the vaccine than the virus
2. IIUC, those proteins are more localized. The soreness with an initial injection is inflammation due to spike protein creation, and that's usually localized to the injection site. The proteins themselves are less likely to travel as widely as the virus.
3. The proteins don't last very long. They're gone after a few days. So long term symptoms wouldn't be due to a continued immune response. They might be due to inflammation that hasn't gone down, I guess, but that seems unlikely to last months.
And again, all of these will be worse with the virus than the vaccine. You'll have more spike proteins, for longer, over a larger part of your body, and also have a virus attacking you in addition to the immune response.
Another thing is that spike protein from the vaccine in the arm has a much tougher time getting to the brain than viruses in the nose/olfactory bulb. That's on top of less spike to begin with.
What is the risk for people who are vaccinated? There should be some level of personal responsibility at this point. Everyone has had a chance to get the vaccine.
People with allergies and pregnant can get the vaccine for the most part, but because I can't find relevant numbers, lets say (incorrectly) that anyone with a food allergy can't get the vaccines: that'd be 32 million people (https://www.aafa.org/allergy-facts/).
~60 million are <12 years of age, which means that they aren't eligible for the vaccine at this time, and I've seen reports that it is unlikely we'll have vaccines for the youngest among us. So 82% of the population is the absolute most we can vaccinate.
With the demographic numbers and the (admittedly terrible proxy of) allergy numbers, 86 million people wouldn't be vaccinated (~25%). With a 0.2% percent fatality rate, we are talking about 170,000 deaths if all of them get infected.
As I understand it, pretty much the only people who aren't eligible for vaccination in the US are those who've had an allergic reaction to a previous dose of the vaccine or one of its ingredients specifically and under-12s, though there are some additional observation requirements for people with a history of certain other allergic reactions. The former is quite a small group and children are at really low risk: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-only-0-005-of-covid-infe...
Ah yes, as soon as the world stops cultivating peanuts to accommodate my lethal (and heritable) peanut allergy. It should be a no brainer after all, with the nearly infinite other foods we have available as substitutes.
Do you feel like prevalent labeling and stringent segregation policies in food handling to accommodate you aren't equivalent? And if someone's dish sends you into anaphylaxis at a dinner party, the host won't be going "Shouldn't have come then! I refuse to live in peanut-fear!".
