This Is the Best Evidence Yet That Anti-Vaxxers Kill A new study finds that roughly 20 million lives were saved by coronavirus vaccines in their first year. https://www.thedailybeast.com/lancet-vaccine-study-is-the-best-evidence-yet-that-anti-vaxxers-kill Official figures show COVID-19 killed more than 5.4 million people through 2021, but the real toll may have been closer to 15 million. And the pandemic remains far from over. But a powerful new study suggests that were it not for the miracle of vaccines, COVID-19 would have taken about 20 million more lives from early December 2020 through early December 2021—the first year that vaccines were available—alone. That represents about half the people killed during the entire span of World War II. Yet the scientific prowess of vaccines—developed in a record time of less than 12 months after COVID-19 was first reported—could have saved millions more lives were it not for extremist politicians, conspiracy theories, and gross inequality across the planet. Science led the way. But our political leaders, mostly on the political right, failed us badly. If they had the moral fortitude to place public welfare above their own self-interest—pushing their constituents to get shots they were skeptical of, and looking out for those abroad—many millions would be alive today. Parents. Grandparents. Children. What did the study released on Thursday, and published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, find? Researchers at Imperial College, London, looked at excess mortality—how many people actually died compared to how many would have been expected to die in the absence of COVID-19—in a modeling study that, as such studies necessarily are, based on reasonable but not necessarily perfectly accurate assumptions. They found that nearly 20 million deaths were averted, and that more than 60 percent of those were in higher-income countries. Most deaths averted were due to vaccines’ ability to prevent severe disease, but also because they reduced transmission and relieved the strain on health systems. In other words, despite the political rhetoric of populist leaders, vaccines have been spectacularly effective. This study highlights what we have known all along, yet with numbers of such magnitude, we can only hope they can move policymakers to heed some key lessons. First, science is a modern miracle. When we invest in it, it repays us literally with our lives. Failure to support medical science is not only foolhardy; it is deadly. Incredibly, we still have not learned this lesson. As Congress failed to re-authorize emergency COVID-19 funding, the Biden administration had to slash research funding for the next generation of vaccines. Members of Congress who stand in the way of science research are risking the lives or their constituents. Second, political leaders have cast doubt on science and public health, questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and doing all they can to fight any sort of vaccine mandate—and it has cost lives. GOP governors have challenged virtually every vaccine mandate, and conservative courts have mostly obliged. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis even threatened the Special Olympics over its vaccine requirements. What if political leaders didn’t look to the next election, but rather stood up for public health and science? We’d see vastly higher vaccination rates in America. And perhaps we’d avoid the embarrassment of having vastly higher COVID-19 death rates in red (or pro-Trump) counties than in blue ones. Third, vaccine equity saves lives. If the U.S. and Europe had not hoarded scarce vaccine supplies (amassing vaccine doses sufficient for double or even triple their populations), many more people would be alive today. The new study found that if WHO’s goal of vaccinating 40 percent of people in low-income countries had been met, about 600,000 lives would have been saved. But the benefits of vaccines could have been dramatically higher. If lower-income countries had sufficient vaccine supply and vaccine delivery infrastructure to save lives at the same rate as higher-income countries reported in the Lancet Infectious Diseases study, it could have saved millions of lives. Even today, nearly 1 in 4 African health workers are not fully vaccinated. This leads to a fourth lesson: invest early. We could have largely avoided vaccine scarcity—which precluded early, high vaccination rates across the world—if we made strategic investments and had different rules aimed at ramping up vaccine supply. We can still learn this lesson to save lives now, and for future pandemics. Regional vaccine hubs should be established to produce mRNA and other vaccines in large quantities. After nearly two years of haggling, the WTO finally reached a deal early this month to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines. Such a waiver should be extended to all future global health emergencies. Scientific data should be open to all. And countries should use any necessary suasion, incentives, contract negotiating power, and legal tools, like the Defense Production Act in the United States, to ramp up vaccine production. Yet rapid production will not be enough. As lower-income countries are now experiencing, having vaccine doses will do little if the infrastructure—the personnel, transportation, and cold storage chains, for example—are not in place. This takes funding. The world has consistently underinvested in this vaccine infrastructure. Even now, the vaccine funding gap (the gap between the funding needed, according to WHO, and that actually allocated) through 2022 is about $3.6 billion. The biggest obstacle is no longer supply, but operational bottlenecks as well as falling demand, which will require new approaches such as integrating vaccine delivery into other health activities, political leadership, and public communications campaigns. Finally, invest early not only in capacity, but truth. Future analysis may well tell us how many of the people who did die from COVID-19 in wealthier countries were due to vaccine hesitancy, mis- and dis-information. The current study should be read along with an earlier study from the Lancet, which found that the top factor associated with lower infection rates and fewer deaths per COVID-19 infection was trust. People must trust public health and science. People must trust the truth. That means a major effort to expand vaccine trust and combat vaccine hesitancy, from building media literacy and working with social-media companies to keep their platforms from being purveyors of deadly information to building networks of community-based organizations and leaders who can create vaccine confidence. And voters must reject politicians who are, literally, killing them. We now have some of the most powerful evidence of the immense live-saving power of COVID-19 vaccines since they first began to make their way into people’s arms. At the flip side of that data is society’s failure—our collective failure. With COVID-19 plummeting on the political priority list, we are setting ourselves up for further disaster. We can only urge our political leaders to pause to reflect on the millions of lives that vaccines saved, and act. Less than ever can we claim that we didn’t know.
Gonna' be a fun time if rabies or BSE ever evolves into an airborne variant. Then we are really buggered.
The first real issue is the anti-vaxxers are driving to roll back vaccinations of any type across the face of the earth. Recent example of this include legislation in Ohio which would not require children to be vaccinated for measles and other diseases to attend public school. The anti-vax movement is making the U.S. very ripe for large scale outbreaks of diseases which will kill thousands of children -- due to diseases which are easily preventable. Keep in mind that herd immunity via very high vaccination rates is key for protecting society against diseases such as measles -- just being vaccinated does not imply you will be definitively protected from dying by the disease. In the realm of coronavirus -- at some point Covid-19 will evolve variants which are both very infectious and very deadly. We are seeing the glimmerings of this with Omicron BA.4/BA.5 which combines aspects of Omicron and Delta. However with some countries across the face of the earth in Africa and other locations having low vaccination rates -- we are going to still see significant number of new variants of Covid-19 being generated. One of them is likely to have a set of very bad characteristics -- which will greatly impact the unvaccinated in terms of serious illness. This is coupled with the other coronavirus reality -- at some point we are likely to see a coronavirus similar to MERS again -- which has a 30% death rate. Fortunately mRNA technology will allow the creation of a vaccine that can address new coronavirus diseases very quickly within 6 months. However if people don't take the vaccine due to anti-vax propaganda then the death toll from new types of deadly coronaviruses will be extreme -- making Covid-19 look minor comparatively. I don't really expect traditional non-airborne diseases such as Ebola, rabies, or BSE to evolve into airborne variants which spread in a manner similar to Covid-19. However the three issues listed in the paragraphs above are enough to cause significant concern. Yes -- the anti-vax movement continually pushing misinformation is going to make the world completely buggered. It is just a matter of time.
Imagine being such a vaxxtard that you ignore all the evidence around you that blatantly show that 1) vaxxtards are creating the new variants; 2) vaxxtards are the superspreaders. The vaccines aren’t vaccines! They don’t work! They don’t stop transmission or infection! They are making things infinitely worse! RETARD!
Why do you think they do not work? As an aside, let me remind you that we are nearly 30 months into this stupid thing, and we are at the level we are at. Stat. So going from here, where do we go? For 30 months you have been claiming they do not work. 30 months later, something is working, because we are not the 1918 flu thing.
Aren’t you paying attention? They don’t stop transmission. They don’t stop infection. Non sterilizing. Efficacy turns negative after just a few months. Horrific side effect profile. There’s a reason there’s never been an effective coronavirus vaccine. You are seeing it now. And the worst is yet to come. OAS, ADE. It’s all playing out in a worst case scenario. The vaxxed are really fucked. STOP STABBING YOURSELF
Vaccines do not do most of the things you say. They do not stop transmission. They do not stop infection. Yes. But that is not the point of a vaccine. Non-sterilizing? Not sure what that menas. The whole idea of vaccines is to keep you from getting sick. This whole BS track that Fauci went on, about how i was to prevent you from getting others sick? He was a moron on that front. Because when I was vaccinated for my diseases as a child, it was to protect ME. ME ME ME. FUCK EVERYONE ELSE. If everyone thought that, then nobody would get sick, because everyone would think about themselves, because that is human nature. That's how we destroyed Polio, for example. It was not so nobody else would get it...It was so WE did not get it. And smallpox! Remember that one? Did you get the smallpox vaccine to protect others? NO! You got it to protect YOURSELF!
The CDC definition of a vaccine has changed often in the last few years. Most recently to accommodate the failed experimental piece of shit they coerced into the arms of billions last year. SO We should be happy we don’t have vaccine enhanced versions of polio going around now. Because leaky vaccines are a danger to us all.
As outlined in the past, the purpose of vaccines are two fold. The first is to prevent serious illness or death from a disease. The second is to prevent infection and transmission of a disease. In fact the overall efficacy measurement of a vaccine is based on these capabilities. Nearly all vaccines are not fully effective in terms of stopping infection of a disease -- along with it the associated capability of a vaccinated person who is infected to further transmit the disease. The typical measurement of this is vaccinated breakthrough rate. The vaccinated breakthrough rate of many common vaccines such as the measles and mumps vaccines is over 3%. This means that in an environment where the disease is highly prevalent three percent of the vaccinated people will be infected and be able to further transmit the disease. The concept of herd immunity is build on the foundation that you need a high vaccination rate to stop an infectious disease from spreading around a community -- taking in account that a small percentage of people will not be vaccinated and that a small percentage of people will have vaccinated breakthrough cases. The establishment of herd immunity via high vaccination rates allows society to be protected from very infectious deadly diseases such as measles which formerly (prior vaccination) killed large numbers of people in breakouts. The Covid vaccines during the Delta wave had a vaccinated breakthrough rate of 0.56% in the U.S. which is much better than many other vaccines. However when Omicron arrived -- which is more infectious and vaccine evasive -- the vaccinated breakthrough rate went up greatly -- to the point where the vaccines were only really effective in preventing severe Covid and not very useful in stopping people from getting infected (down of 15% to 25% effectiveness in prevention approx.). This issue with Covid infection prevention is likely to change with the introduction of the Omicron specific boosters this fall -- which have been found in trials to be much more capable of preventing Omicron infection. The primary issue with Covid-19 is that it is evolving very quickly with new variants -- similar to the flu. An just like the flu we will need to have yearly boosters which will target the latest Covid variants. Scientists are still working on universal vaccines for the Flu and Covid -- which will allow us to avoid needing yearly boosters. This article discusses progress of a universal flu vaccine. Universal Flu Vaccine Enters Clinical Trials in Humans The test will inoculate 100 volunteers with a vaccine that protected mice from lethal doses of six different flu strains https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...e-enters-clinical-trials-in-humans-180980354/