Thanks, man, it was a good read and you explained it much better this time, appreciate you taking the time to clarify it. Don't go into the effective part, we'll be here all day (the efficacy is from 40 to 90+ depending on what we're talking about but you can certainly question the protocols and cohorts for sure and how effective they are in real life outside the lab is a whole other ball of wax like you point out). I noticed you like to argue but it's all good, so do I, that's what makes this place good. Spot on about the rest.
I wasn't aware they found a new problem with the testing but we've known for a while there's a problem with testing (a big one). There's a difference between false negative and false positive too. That has statistical implications like you said. The tests for covid are basically a toss of the coin. If you want to hear something funny, I know of people who tested one way or another and when they didn't like the result, went back to test until they got what they wanted lol. There are some fairly reliable ways to test for it though but I don't think they're widely used. Even if they were, the problems get worse and worse as testing is scaled, as you know. I do agree that you can't really make policy decisions with most of the numbers because they're either up in the air or tainted or misinterpreted somehow. It's not an issue for me because of what I believe (in consent) and because biology, like chemistry or physics, is like a loaded gun. You can do a lot with it (good, boring, bad). I'm sure you feel the same way about stats. FWIW, I think the issues with how covid is handled is in the stats, not the biology. I'm sure that must be as annoying to you as it to me when I see fudged or spun publications. I cringe hearing about testing too but I can't control how people use things. You and I wouldn’t even be having this discussion if things had been done with covid the way they’ve been done for a century.
About the word effective, we're not arguing about that. I explained to you the words I used (they're accurate) and why I used efficacy. That's not up for debate. You're going to drop it and read what I said until you understand it. I understand what you're talking about something being effective in the real world and it's not what I said.
As far as the the 99% thing, you're playing a statistical trick and you know it. We could debate about it but you know the difference and what you did in your example.
I don't need to flex on you. I just need you to have a decent grasp on the biology, that's it. I wouldn't care if you didn't go around trying to change "how people think" but since you are, you just have to do a little better. I'm sure if you saw a stat mistake I made, you'd try to help me too. Anyway, I'm glad we solved this. Do you compete in IDPA or something?
The problem with that is you'd have to deal with all the actual batshit insane people too. There are a looooooooooot of uh ... special people out there. Just look at flat earth. For every "cia is dealing drugs and killing americans on home-soil", you have a flat earther and an anal probing visitation survivor.
Well, as someone who has used books as toilet paper, I can assure you it's not thoroughly absorbent. That pede was right. You have to scrunch them up and kinda abrade the page against its folds to loosen it a bit (you'll see what I mean if you ever find yourself in that situation). Sometimes it takes a few minutes so you have to start the process while you're on the shitter. Newspaper works a bit better but it's not strong enough so you have to double or triple ply it. NGL, when I read Fahrenheit 451 as a child, I was a bit confused why book burning was so controversial ... I'd been using them to make fire for years. I really did see western toilet paper as a much more valuable product.
Kangs: I'll wash ur dong for ... 2 copper
DaJooz: I'd literally rather cut my foreskin off
History 102 with u/burrito and u/Redditcanblowme
Uh.. it's going to take me a while to parse that so probably tomorrow but you're still doing the same DAMN THING... talking to me like i'm some fucking empty vessel for your projections of OTHER DAMN PEOPLE. Stop it! I'm not "those people" and I'm not trying to bamboozle you, man. I hope you're in a better mood tomorrow.
I can respect that. Let's get this rant done.
rant: We'll start with some comments and move on to the education part in the second half. There are a few things going on here. You and several other people are seeing trigger words and getting triggered. You're imagining I'm saying things I'm not and arguing against things I never even touched. I don't blame you for ending up like this because there are a lot of people full of shit trying to make policy decisions about your lives and rights, you're being propagandized and lied to, and it's hard being you when you don't have a basic grasp of biology. You're reacting to my words as if one of those people is saying it to you. You're projecting. Let me tell you a little bit about me. I'm a bio nerd and I completely oppose forced vaccinations or anything like that. I have a pretty solid grasp of the arguments for and against vaccinations and I honestly don't care if you (or anyone else) take advantage of vaccinations or any kind of medical procedures or ... don't. I feel strongly about people who choose to be ignorant and make medical decisions, especially for their children, but ... I care about consent even more than that; I would oppose any legislation that takes that consent from anyone. For a reason why consent matters, you don' thave to look further than Jenner's original experiment with cowpox.
Okay, let's get to the education part. Vaccines are called that because of the word vaca. It's latin for cow. For specifics about the kinds of vaccines and methods, look at the pamphlet I linked. It's a pretty old technique. The science has been adequately understood for about a century. You take a virus, you innoculate (or inject) the patient with a virus, and you get an immune response. You might use a different strain of the virus, a similar virus, or parts of a virus to get that response. You already know that not everyone can get a virus. Some people are immune to it because they've had it, they've had something similar and their immune system protects them, or ... their body just can't be infected for whatever reason (we don't always know why). I colloquially use the term immune to encompass everyone here but I do understand that's not technically correct since it's not always an immune reaction that protects people. We can nitpick about this but I'd rather not. Anyway, we know viruses are usually not 100% effective, as in, they don't infect everyone they bump into. In that same way, vaccines are usually not 100% effective. We can go deeper into why but it's not really relevant. When I use the word efficacy, this is the technical phenomenon I'm referring to. I was pretty precise in my word choice because I meant something specific to be understood by the reader. Why didn't I use effectiveness? Because the two words don't mean the same thing. Efficacy is a clinical result. You inject x many subjects with the vaccine, you get y many immune responses. If you study it further, maybe you can even get z many subjects who don't get the virus you're vaccinating for. Sometimes people use efficacy interchangeably between the two but within a clinical context, you usually know what's up. Effectiveness is a bit more wishy-washy, nebulous, term. It means how effective a vaccine is for a virus within a general population. It's kind of hard to study and talk about. Herd immunity (your trigger word), is kind of like that. It's a bit nebulous. Yes, it does come from the concept of the cow. It basically means the threshold or number of animals in the herd that a virus doesn't work on for only the infected animals to suffer. Basically, it's the number of animals you can have immune (colloquially, for whatever reason) that you can put a bunch of infected cows from another herd with them and not have new cases (or very few). If we want to discuss specifics, that's where things kind of fall apart. That's because it's different for every virus, you're never going to get 0 new infections on transplant of the infected from another herd, and what does it really matter anyway. The consequences are one thing for the flu and another for the pox or ebola. We do know there is such a thing as herd immunity because we've stamped out certain diseases in certain areas with vaccines. Then, when the number of immune people fell, contagious transplants were able to create outbreaks in those areas. So we're not arguing about that. What's the number is a good question to ask. It's one thing for the flu and possibly another for the pox. We got rid of the pox, we have NEVER been able to get rid of "the flu". There are reasons we can get into but we've had herd immunity for the pox (resistance above 93%) but never had it for the flu (resistance somewhere around 40-60% if I had to pull a number out of my ass). The article you cited is interesting. I think it brings up a good point. There are two things we discuss in the context of effectiveness and herd immunity: models and actual data. They're both science but I think you'll agree actual data is stronger than the models. Some people will try to trick you there but I won't because it really does matter that people understand the difference. I want you to decide for or against something both on your feelings about it and a basic understanding of what you're being told. We have data for the pox, we have some data for covid, we have some data for flu, and we have models for all of those. It's not worth talking about the models for pox because the data there weeds out wrong models. The models for covid have also been spectacularly wrong, and when updated with the real data, pretty accurate. I'm not going to discuss the bullshit because that's a whole other rant by itself. The point is we know we can get herd immunity at 90+%. We know we can't get it at 40-60%. But what about 10%? First of all, the percentage of people who can get covid is about 30%. That's pretty solid data at this point. If you innoculate/vaccinate/protect/whatever 10% of the population, you now have 80% of people who maybe won't get it but simple math tells us that leaves 20% of the population vulnerable. Is that 80% number enough to grant them herd immunity as the models in your article indicate? That's a great question. I think there's value in that line of thinking. But ... the answer is no. That's outrageous! How can we know that? Well, because of the data on homeless people. 30% could get it, and 30% got it. They were mostly asymptomatic which is another interesting quirk but the answer is NO, 80% is not enough to confer herd immunity. Which is fine because that article was also based on models, just like the original (wrong) models on covid. Now... I hear you, I understand your point: well, what does it matter if 30% of bums got covid if they never exhibited symptoms? That's a great point! I respect your line of thinking, but it doesn't invalidate the VERY basic concept of vaccines, innoculation, efficacy, effectiveness, herd immunity, etc; you know, the science. I know, your ears are burning hearing that word but consider this. The "science" has been pretty settled for about a century. This is why ever since the spanish flu, the US Government's position has been that there's really nothing to be done about airborne respiratory pathogens except develop herd immunity and develop vaccines to reduce suffering. Basically, these diseases are going to run through the population and do their thing one way or another. You can let the virus do its thing and hurt people or help it along doing its thing with another version that does less damage. Until Covid, this was pretty much how things were done. People pulled some bullshit on you and now you're throwing away the baby with the bathwater. I'm not going to address some of your specific claims about what I said because they're bizzare but I hope at least now you understand the basic biology better. I don't personally need anyone to be immune or vaccinated or wear a mask or whatever. I hope you consider that when you process this information instead of rejecting it.
I'd appreciate it if you took another 15 min of your time and: watched this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=105ebQ8VSsE&t=3s ) then read this 2018 (pre-covid) presentation ( https://www.nursing.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/Roberts_Herd_Immunity.pdf )
I specifically picked a 2018 resource so you'd understand you're not being bamboozled and I'm not throwing bullshit at you because it was done before anyone had to worry about changing the "science" to fit their political narrative. Yeah, you'll see some vaccine encouragement but there's nothing I can do about that, there's only so much spin I can pull out for you.
and finally, if you have some time, just quickly skim this ( https://www.kimt.com/content/news/Mayo-Clinic-explains-vaccine-efficacy-versus-vaccine-effectiveness-573896051.html )
PM me if you have any questions in this area. I appreciate that you're trying to make people think better, I really do, but you have to be careful with that when it's not an area you know a lot about.
Sigh ... I love this meme, don't get me wrong, but I had this sony camera like 20 years ago and a cat that looked exactly like that boom mic and I don't have a single picture of that cat which isn't fuzzed. The cat looks like it's photoshopped in every picture I have.
I know you're being flippant but I'll go ahead and post cringe by "explaining" the meme. Some of these "vaccines" are 60% effective. Yeah, that's right, 40% of the people "innoculated" don't develop immunity. You need something like 90% immunity to reach "herd immunity" and about 60% of the population doesn't seem affected by this virus anyway. That has a lot of implications but tl;dr: you can take the "vaccine" all day and you won't have herd immunity.
rant: some of these things are vaccines, others qualify more as gene therapy, you can't really talk about all of them in one context. they're all different, have different efficacies, different side-effects. A lot of people have to take the yearly flu vaccine too and a little known fact, that's equally shit at being a vaccine. You can look up some of the arguments for/against the "yearly flu vaccine" to read more and it will mostly apply here. Even well designed vaccines sometimes never go above 90% and that can be increased or decreased simply by using different adjuvants. I don't know if the meme maker knew all this and made a really meta meme or has no idea and we're dealing with an ignoramus but either way, the meme works. It's funny, it can lead to people asking the right questions to learn about how vacciens work, and you won't get your ass kicked too hard in a colloquial debate if you invoke this meme.
Where the heck were you finding .308 for 30cpr?