COVID vaccines and breakthrough infections and hospitalizations/deaths
Misinformation about COVID and COVID vaccines still irks me, but I try to read points of view that I disagree with instead of shutting everything out.
One independent journalist on Substack was complaining about getting COVID again, again!, despite receiving all of his shots. I've also had COVID twice despite getting all of my shots. Although the US is spending fewer resources tracking COVID now, there are indications that we're currently going through our second-biggest wave of COVID, second only to that Omicron wave a couple years ago, when more than half of US residents caught COVID (including me) over the Christmas/NYE holidays.
A lot of people have reasonably concluded that the shots are shit because they got COVID anyway. This journalist complained that with most vaccines, it keeps you from catching the illness, so what the fuck is wrong with these mRNA shots for COVID?
Well ... ... like with most things in the real world, vaccines work on a spectrum. Some of them are nearly 100% effective, while others are more like flipping a coin. There are multiple reasons for why this is so. Some viruses, like COVID, mutate a lot and are able to mutate around the vaccines. Influenza is like this also -- influenza vaccines have never been 100% effective and need to be updated each year. It turned out the Monkeypox vaccines weren't 100% effective either. So COVID isn't alone in the vaccines lacking 100% effectiveness.
Nevertheless, careful scientific studies have shown that the COVID shots reduce hospitalizations and deaths, including the latest shot against the latest variant. Although you caught COVID anyway, what you can't easily tell is how much worse the illness would've been without your shots.
It is true that the early results for the first COVID shots showed high effectiveness at preventing infection. But then COVID mutuated, and breakthrough infections became common, and we humans slowly came around to realize we'd need to continually update the shots to match the mutations, and then COVID would mutate AGAIN, so ... we're never going to win, but with annual booster shots we can reduce hospitalizations and deaths. Just like we do with annual flu shots.
Yet, there's misinformation out there that the vaccines themselves make COVID worse, which is just bullshit, there's no evidence of this.
Every so often a new virus comes along that hits some sort of sweet spot, of not deadly enough to encourage people to wipe it out, contagious enough to keep spreading, mutates enough to persist, and so forth. COVID was one of these successful new viruses. As HIV was newly successful in its own way. And there are other new and evolving pathgens all the time, each of them competing to find their own sweet spot.
We've done such a good job of improving public health over the past couple centuries that when a new and deadly virus comes along, there's a lot of denial and misinformation about it. People just want to continue their normal illness-free lives, of course. But COVID was deadly enough to reduce overall human life expectancy, even though most people survive catching it. I've met people who then died from COVID, COVID is real!
I expect I'll get COVID again every couple years. And maybe I'll even die of it someday as I keep getting older. One of these days a new COVID mutuation might make it much deadlier. Who knows?
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Sometimes I worry about a new type of HIV-like virus popping up and doing what AIDS did to the gay community -- quietly spreading while we all fuck like bunnies without condoms, and by the time we realize there's a new virus spreading, half of us are infected and going to die. Current regular STI testing wouldn't find a new virus. Current PREP and PEP drugs wouldn't stop it either. There could be a new stealth virus spreading right now and we don't know, we'd only find out after it incubates for a few years and then starts killing people with weird symptoms. For somebody like me who lived through the AIDS epidemic, the idea that it could happen again lurks like a ghost, while the youngsters compete with each other to see how many "loads" they can take in one evening while blindfolded and bound to a sling at MAL.
Is it PTSD, or is it having enough experience with the cycle of life and death that I cannot simply throw my ass on a sling and allow 20 strangers to fuck me without condoms?
I feel the general triumph of public health over the past couple centuries has taught most humans to pretend that infectious diseases don't actually exist. But they still do.
One independent journalist on Substack was complaining about getting COVID again, again!, despite receiving all of his shots. I've also had COVID twice despite getting all of my shots. Although the US is spending fewer resources tracking COVID now, there are indications that we're currently going through our second-biggest wave of COVID, second only to that Omicron wave a couple years ago, when more than half of US residents caught COVID (including me) over the Christmas/NYE holidays.
A lot of people have reasonably concluded that the shots are shit because they got COVID anyway. This journalist complained that with most vaccines, it keeps you from catching the illness, so what the fuck is wrong with these mRNA shots for COVID?
Well ... ... like with most things in the real world, vaccines work on a spectrum. Some of them are nearly 100% effective, while others are more like flipping a coin. There are multiple reasons for why this is so. Some viruses, like COVID, mutate a lot and are able to mutate around the vaccines. Influenza is like this also -- influenza vaccines have never been 100% effective and need to be updated each year. It turned out the Monkeypox vaccines weren't 100% effective either. So COVID isn't alone in the vaccines lacking 100% effectiveness.
Nevertheless, careful scientific studies have shown that the COVID shots reduce hospitalizations and deaths, including the latest shot against the latest variant. Although you caught COVID anyway, what you can't easily tell is how much worse the illness would've been without your shots.
It is true that the early results for the first COVID shots showed high effectiveness at preventing infection. But then COVID mutuated, and breakthrough infections became common, and we humans slowly came around to realize we'd need to continually update the shots to match the mutations, and then COVID would mutate AGAIN, so ... we're never going to win, but with annual booster shots we can reduce hospitalizations and deaths. Just like we do with annual flu shots.
Yet, there's misinformation out there that the vaccines themselves make COVID worse, which is just bullshit, there's no evidence of this.
Every so often a new virus comes along that hits some sort of sweet spot, of not deadly enough to encourage people to wipe it out, contagious enough to keep spreading, mutates enough to persist, and so forth. COVID was one of these successful new viruses. As HIV was newly successful in its own way. And there are other new and evolving pathgens all the time, each of them competing to find their own sweet spot.
We've done such a good job of improving public health over the past couple centuries that when a new and deadly virus comes along, there's a lot of denial and misinformation about it. People just want to continue their normal illness-free lives, of course. But COVID was deadly enough to reduce overall human life expectancy, even though most people survive catching it. I've met people who then died from COVID, COVID is real!
I expect I'll get COVID again every couple years. And maybe I'll even die of it someday as I keep getting older. One of these days a new COVID mutuation might make it much deadlier. Who knows?
-----
Sometimes I worry about a new type of HIV-like virus popping up and doing what AIDS did to the gay community -- quietly spreading while we all fuck like bunnies without condoms, and by the time we realize there's a new virus spreading, half of us are infected and going to die. Current regular STI testing wouldn't find a new virus. Current PREP and PEP drugs wouldn't stop it either. There could be a new stealth virus spreading right now and we don't know, we'd only find out after it incubates for a few years and then starts killing people with weird symptoms. For somebody like me who lived through the AIDS epidemic, the idea that it could happen again lurks like a ghost, while the youngsters compete with each other to see how many "loads" they can take in one evening while blindfolded and bound to a sling at MAL.
Is it PTSD, or is it having enough experience with the cycle of life and death that I cannot simply throw my ass on a sling and allow 20 strangers to fuck me without condoms?
I feel the general triumph of public health over the past couple centuries has taught most humans to pretend that infectious diseases don't actually exist. But they still do.