Life does not come with any guarantees. When it is your time to go, it is your time to go.
You do you, but Imma go out fighting.
You think I'm not fighting ? I didn't go through the hell I've been through just to simply roll over and die. I may be a fatalist, but that does not mean that I am trying to hasten my own death. Knowing pretty much the hell I have been through, you remind me of the insult that my sister (who later also came down with lymphoma and who I hooked up with my onc just to save her from all the bs out there) said to me when she visited me during one of my first rounds of chemo. But Kurt, you're not taking your cancer seriously. She did not understand my attitude towards my cancer. That comment was the turning point in my relationship with my sister going forward. Something about making judgements ...
Attitude. It's serious shit. It makes all the difference in the world in how you take on problems and solve them and resolve them.
This is all front in center in my mind right now as this, almost to the day, is the 13th anniversary of my diagnosis which is also my real birthday. Only 20% of me make it past 5 years and it came back once already about 5 years ago.
You can say anything you want about me, but don't ever say I am not a fighter or infer that I am not still fighting, ever.
And just to be crystal clear, my official attitude is I'm always going to land on my feet no matter how bad it gets, until I don't. I'll worry about the don't part when it happens. But not until.
Lastly, to stay on topic, I carefully listened, picked my preferred vaccine and worked extremely hard to get vaccinated ASAP and did in February / March. I am not anti vaccine, for me ...
And one more note to add regarding the fully vaccinated. On Tuesday when initially I started this post, the lady I work with at that store told me that she had a friend who was double vaxed, caught it and just died. She was in her early 50's. Drives home that fully vaxed just means that you are fully vaxed.
Life does not come with any guarantees. When it is your time to go, it is your time to go.
Every death of someone fully vaxed is someone's anecdote. We sadly just lost a fully vaxed person in the state. Well, depending on how you are counting - They were within 2 weeks of their second shot so the immunity was still building up.
Fatalism is fine if you have already done everything you reasonably can to tip the odds in your favour. But it can come off as being uncaring to others and, depending on context, can seem like you are discouraging others from doing what they reasonably can.
COVID-19 vaccines are effective and are a critical tool to bring the pandemic under control; however, no vaccine is 100% effective at preventing illness. Some fully vaccinated people will get sick, and some will even be hospitalized or die from COVID-19. However, there is evidence that vaccination may make illness less severe for those who are vaccinated and still get sick. The risk of infection, hospitalization, and death are all much lower in vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated.
"Your time" can come a lot sooner without vaccination (or cancer treatment).
And I will add one more thought ... It is quite clear now that even with a 100% vaccination rate, CV is not going away and people are still going to become infected and some are still going to die. We must find a way to live with it as has been brought up by miamiz a short while ago.
a couple of thoughts as i understand it
immune systems and their responses to natural infection and vaccination can and do vary, it is a spectrum obviously age and co-morbidities play a huge role in those responses natural infection produces a soup of antibodies against many parts of the whole virus versus vaccination antibodies which are focused on the spike protein/business end in the older or immune compromised individuals natural exposure has a much higher risk of undesirable outcomes than do vaccinations challenges? not everyone knows that they may have a co-morbidity and once you’re exposed to covid it’s probably too late if we look at the data case fatality rate we see it grows exponentially (example: the leap from 60-64 to 65+ is about 4x and there’s long covid too) you will be exposed to covid so the question becomes: what is your strategy? postponing the inevitable? letting someone else decide for you?
speak with your doctor regarding and implementing a risk strategy most countries are coming to grips with the reality and are using best practices to influence the outcome do what you can to encourage vaccination, especially in the most vulnerable crowd (say 40 and up) and prep your medical facilities to handle expected flows and be willing to adjust your strategy accordingly
Yep, I am firmly in that high risk / age category. Just hit the big 69 as a matter of fact.
Having a plan in place is not something I have done yet and quite frankly had not even thought about it until you mentioned it right now. Even better, my GP will probably be retiring within the year or sooner. The search for a new one is already underway.
So I spent yesterday morning at my onc's getting caught up since everything fell apart over the past two years due to CV, scheduling this and that. Going out the door, I remembered to ask so what happens if I do get CV. We verified that I had Moderna and she said that they have found that it has the longest lasting antibodies and that she had Moderna, too. So anyway, yes, there is a plan with a positive for CV. The Clinic has an outpatient spot in one of their hospitals where we would be treated with monoclonal antibodies. Yay!! Biden has not cut everyone off, try as he has to limit their availability.
And one more note to add regarding the fully vaccinated. On Tuesday when initially I started this post, the lady I work with at that store told me that she had a friend who was double vaxed, caught it and just died. She was in her early 50's. Drives home that fully vaxed just means that you are fully vaxed.
Life does not come with any guarantees. When it is your time to go, it is your time to go.
This is great progress, but there is even more in the vaccine pipeline.
Compared to the 95 percent efficacy of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, 50 percent may not sound like much, but a 2020 modeling study estimated that rolling out the vaccine in the areas with the higher prevalence of the illness could prevent 5.3 million cases and 24,000 deaths annually.
"This is a historic moment. The long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health and malaria control," said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement. "Using this vaccine on top of existing tools to prevent malaria could save tens of thousands of young lives each year."
Indiaâs coronavirus death toll could now amount to a government payout of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The countryâs Supreme Court has ordered Indiaâs disaster management agency to pay 50,000 rupees, about $671, to families of people who have died from Covid. Indiaâs official toll from the pandemic is 449,260, although experts estimate that the true number of Covid deaths is several times higher. Even that smaller number would suggest payouts amounting to about $300 million.
The number of families applying for compensation could quickly balloon, because the government has expanded the definition of what qualifies as a Covid-19 death to anyone who died within 30 days of a positive RT-PCR test or clinical examination confirming the infection. (...)
Unfortunately I expect the poorest peopl,e who need the payout the most, are the least likely to have had the covid test.
I believe there is a disconnect. There are those among the unvaccinated who do not believe this choice involves a social structure at all. For them, it falls entirely in the sphere of individual rights.
Exactly, .. and they thereby miss the point entirely.
Edit: to elaborate.. individual rights ONLY have meaning in a social context. Without social structures individual rights don't mean anything. This is the internal dialectic of individual liberty. The yin and yang of being a social creature. You can't champion individual liberty (here the right not to get vaccinated) without predicating the existence of society (i.e. a group of people who are not dead yet) and its norms and influences (from which the individual wants to be free).
Radical (free of society) freedom in the way such people use it, as though social concerns play no role whatsoever, is like suiting up and getting spaced till you die your natural death (I've been watching a lot of The Expanse lately). That can't possibly be their goal, no matter how much they insist individual liberty is what it is all about. No, what they actually want is to be "free-er" but still in a social context. This is the unstated part of their argument, but implicit in its logic.
In the end, with COVID, none of this discussion is even relevant, for the virus will seek out any suitable hosts, regardless of their political ideas. It will simply hit those who are not protected or immuno-compromised harder. These individuals and society as a whole will bear the burden of those who fail to play along with the vaccination program, because that is the inevitable result of such behaviour. That is a simple fact of nature.
But we would certainly have an easier time at containing the disease, if people were just a little bit more intellectually honest with themselves. And a lot fewer people would die as a result of people chasing purported freedoms that they don't actually want anyway.
think that you and most everyone else is getting this point wrong and attaching your own interpretation to the point that I am trying to make.
It is not about not getting vaccinated and holding out for infection and survival after the fact. It is simply recognizing that having natural immunity after infection does have meaning and value and needs to be included in the overall discussion as valid and meaningful in the big picture. Instead it is summarily dismissed and those who dare to mention it get trashed. And that is everywhere in the media, not just here. Why is that ? You and others keep asking what is it that I fear ? Well I have to ask you and all the others who insist that I am afraid, why are you all afraid of its mere mention let alone discussing it ?
What is the basis of your fear for simply acknowledging it ?
Is natural immunity post infection not real ? Is there no acceptable science to support its existence ?
I'd like to respond to this...but I already did. In the very next paragraph from the one you bolded.
The only context where this matters is in excluding people from social situations, and using the immunity from recovering from covid as an equivalent to vaccination. Which means documenting it.
As in...a vaccine an immunity passport. Which so far has been political kryptonite.
Is that really where you want to go?
IMO, deliberately keeping it out of discussions involving vaccination makes these discussions invalid and only drives the thought that there are ulterior motives on the part of those who keep it from even being mentioned, let alone discussed. It is vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. There are no other alternatives. Alternatives are not permitted to be discussed. Sounds authoritarian to me and only spurs resistance rather than ameliorate it.
There is a reason for vaccinating. vaccinating. vaccinating: it f#cking works. You and sird seem incapable of absorbing this, but the hospitalized, the ventilated, and the dying are overwhelmingly (like by a factor of ten+) the unvaccinated. THAT MEANS IT WORKS. If it hadn't worked those in the hospital and dying would reflect the vaccination rate in the community. 60% vaxxed in the community? 60% vaxxed in the ICU. It ain't like that, it's more like 5-10% vaxxed in the ICU.
Can you, for once, acknowledge that?
Remember back when the battle cry was "It's just the flu!"? If we had had these vaccines at the start of the pandemic it would have been. The US lost about half a million people before the vaccines arrived. Had we had the vaccines then (and had they been universally adopted) the death rate would have been less than 50K—a bad flu season.
We can handle a bad flu season. We've had them before and we'll have them again. No lockdowns, no massive disruptions to our lives.
If you are talking to the unvaccinated/unrecovered with the demand for an "alternative" how are we supposed to take that? What do you propose to protect them?
Like, say, my neighbor—who just hadn't gotten around to it, but now his wife tested positive. She's vaxxed, still on her feet, doing chores and suffering a bit but not even bedridden. Him? He's quarantining with her. If he comes down with it his chances are a lot worse.
But if he lives he'll have that coveted natural immunity. And he will have paid dearly for it.
Location: Perched on the precipice of the cauldron of truth
Posted:
Oct 5, 2021 - 9:36am
NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:
woah, sorry if that came across as snark or condescension. It wasn't meant like that at all. As I stated, the role of a brave individual standing up to collective stupidity is something I admire and applaud and I'm certain that SirD sincerely believes that is what he is doing.
I was just trying to point out that when your species is getting bombarded with hostile microbes that basing your arguments on a level of reasoning that is all about social structure and the boundaries of individual liberty is suddenly kind of redundant. Not necessarily wrong. Just redundant.
Your points were well taken.
I believe there is a disconnect. There are those among the unvaccinated who do not believe this choice involves a social structure at all. For them, it falls entirely in the sphere of individual rights.
Indiaâs coronavirus death toll could now amount to a government payout of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The countryâs Supreme Court has ordered Indiaâs disaster management agency to pay 50,000 rupees, about $671, to families of people who have died from Covid. Indiaâs official toll from the pandemic is 449,260, although experts estimate that the true number of Covid deaths is several times higher. Even that smaller number would suggest payouts amounting to about $300 million.
The number of families applying for compensation could quickly balloon, because the government has expanded the definition of what qualifies as a Covid-19 death to anyone who died within 30 days of a positive RT-PCR test or clinical examination confirming the infection. (...)
woah, sorry if that came across as snark or condescension. It wasn't meant like that at all. As I stated, the role of a brave individual standing up to collective stupidity is something I admire and applaud and I'm certain that SirD sincerely believes that is what he is doing. I was just trying to point out that when your species is getting bombarded with hostile microbes that basing your arguments on a level of reasoning that is all about social structure and the boundaries of individual liberty is suddenly kind of redundant. Not necessarily wrong. Just redundant.
no i apologize if it came off as targeting or directing this toward you please forgive me (and i'll buy you a beer the next time we meet)
maybe stated differently if we want to persuade someone (and we all do) having a trustworthy relationship is key (imho)
and for the record please don't take anything i post personally most of it could be considered a therapeutic ramble
maybe this would help explain my current thought process
woah, sorry if that came across as snark or condescension. It wasn't meant like that at all. As I stated, the role of a brave individual standing up to collective stupidity is something I admire and applaud and I'm certain that SirD sincerely believes that is what he is doing. I was just trying to point out that when your species is getting bombarded with hostile microbes that basing your arguments on a level of reasoning that is all about social structure and the boundaries of individual liberty is suddenly kind of redundant. Not necessarily wrong. Just redundant.
No. Your comment was well articulated. So, how should the social scientists define 'hostile microbes' other than in terms of microbiology? Kind of a rhetorical question...
woah, sorry if that came across as snark or condescension. It wasn't meant like that at all. As I stated, the role of a brave individual standing up to collective stupidity is something I admire and applaud and I'm certain that SirD sincerely believes that is what he is doing.
I was just trying to point out that when your species is getting bombarded with hostile microbes that basing your arguments on a level of reasoning that is all about social structure and the boundaries of individual liberty is suddenly kind of redundant. Not necessarily wrong. Just redundant.
