COVID-19 Thread [V2.0]

[jerichoholicninja]

Perhaps just the media overblowing something like always but seems that there is a sizable amount of healthcare workers refusing the vaccine. My wife has been all trust the science, follow the rules, I work in healthcare so I know what's going on, etc. from the beginning but even she told me she's probably not going to get it and most of her co-workers have said the same.

 

Can you be more clear and tell me why?

 

Her big reason right now is she's breastfeeding and she says there's no research about how it might affect that. But she said even if she wasn't she's still on the fence. Didn't really elaborate. I don't know why her co-workers don't want it. A few have gotten the vaccine already though.

[stoutdude04]

My friends in the health industry have all gotten their first round and everyone one of them has said we would be silly not to. I asked if they would give it to their kids and they have all said, 'absolutely'.

 

Wrt the MIL. Very frustrating.

[wallus]

I think they will run into roadblocks like not being able to fly without the vaccine in the future. But if they don't want it, that's their choice.

[jjgott]

If people in the higher priority tiers are refusing, states need to start opening up their "tiers." No sense in having doses sit unused.

[jerichoholicninja]

If people in the higher priority tiers are refusing, states need to start opening up their "tiers." No sense in having doses sit unused.

 

My buddy in Florida said it's available to everyone today.

[Fear The Chorizo]

Perhaps just the media overblowing something like always but seems that there is a sizable amount of healthcare workers refusing the vaccine. My wife has been all trust the science, follow the rules, I work in healthcare so I know what's going on, etc. from the beginning but even she told me she's probably not going to get it and most of her co-workers have said the same.

 

Can you be more clear and tell me why?

 

When you look at results of the studies done on vaccines available currently, the really simple reason is that for healthy and able-bodied people the risk of an averse reaction to the vaccination is probably greater than getting COVID themselves. And not to mention, there have already been a TON of frontline workers/medical personnel who have already gotten and recovered from COVID and feel like their immune system's natural immunity/tolerance to any future infection should preclude them from getting vaccinated.

 

While understandable to view frontline workers/medical personnel as top of the list professions who should get this vaccine as soon as possible, to me the groups who need to get vaccinated 1st should be the elderly and residents of nursing home facilities - then work down by age, not so much profession.

 

The aversion to getting this vaccine doesn't really fall along political lines, either because there are quite a few different reasons as to why people don't want it. I think there is mixture of both fear among a wide variety of people (both the justifiable unknown from a lack of typical studies and unjustifiable conspiracy theories), and many others feeling like other people should get vaccinated before they do among others that is leading to an uneven vaccination rollout. At the end of the day I think the more people who are vaccinated, the better off society is overall - at this point the best approach may be to focus on getting as many nursing home residents/80+ yr olds vaccinated as possible, then just open it up to the general public with an emphasis on trying to push people who have yet to have a confirmed COVID case to get jabbed.

[PeaveyFury]

When you look at results of the studies done on vaccines available currently, the really simple reason is that for healthy and able-bodied people the risk of an averse reaction to the vaccination is probably greater than getting COVID themselves.

 

Do you have actual data to support this claim? Seems a dangerous statement to make unless you have verifiable proof...

 

many others feeling like other people should get vaccinated before they do among others that is leading to an uneven vaccination rollout

 

This, I think, is a good point. In so many of the 'gotcha' news headlines regarding 'healthcare workers declining to get the vaccine,' I'd be curious to know what percentages are doing so out of some sort of concern regarding the vaccine, vs. simply wanting someone else to take their place in line because they feel they don't need to be first-ish.

[FVBrewerFan]

These are all good questions, no doubt. In the meantime there's plenty of elderly next in line. Just keep the process moving forward.

[sveumrules]

When you look at results of the studies done on vaccines available currently, the really simple reason is that for healthy and able-bodied people the risk of an averse reaction to the vaccination is probably greater than getting COVID themselves.

 

Do you have actual data to support this claim? Seems a dangerous statement to make unless you have verifiable proof...

 

According to this article (https://www.vox.com/22158238/covid-19-vaccine-side-effects-explained) it looks like...

 

"About 16 percent of people who got the shot in clinical trials experienced a “severe” systemic adverse reaction"

 

Most recent numbers have somewhere around 20.5 million Covid cases in the US vs a population of 328 million, or about a 6.3% infection rate. Now obviously that risk is probably higher for health care workers given their increased chances for exposure, but by how much though? I don't know.

[homer]

"Severe" to me is anaphylactic shock. FDA defines it in slightly less dramatic terms:

 

And this may be especially true for Moderna’s vaccine: About 16 percent of people who got the shot in clinical trials experienced a “severe” systemic adverse reaction, a classification the FDA uses to refer to side effects, like fever or fatigue, that require medical attention and prevent people from going about their daily activities.

 

“Think about [reactogenicity] as mouthwash — it’s hurting while it’s working,” Omer said. “The key is to prepare people to know this will happen — this may hurt a little, give you a bit of fever — but these are short-term, known side effects that you need to be aware of.”

 

Mostly mild and moderate side effects are the safety profiles of both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines — and that’s why the FDA in the US and drug regulators in other countries around the world are rushing to bring them to market.

 

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine caused mild or moderate reactions in most people, and severe reactions were rare.

 

Mild: “No interference with activity”

Moderate: “Repeated use of nonnarcotic pain reliever > 24 hours or some interference with activity”

Severe: “Any use of narcotic pain reliever or prevents daily activity”

Potentially life-threatening: “ER visit or hospitalization”

[Machu Peach]

According to this article (https://www.vox.com/22158238/covid-19-vaccine-side-effects-explained) it looks like...

 

"About 16 percent of people who got the shot in clinical trials experienced a “severe” systemic adverse reaction"

Systemic adverse reactions fall into 'solicited' and 'unsolicited' categories. With solicited adverse reactions the investigators ask questions like "Did you have a headache?" and so on. With unsolicited they ask "Do you have any other symptoms?" I think it would surprise no one to learn that people are far far more likely to report solicited adverse reactions than unsolicited.

 

In the Moderna trial linked in the Vox website 57% of people reported a solicited adverse reaction after receiving the first vaccine. That may seem crazy high until one sees that over 44% of the placebo group also reported a solicited adverse reaction. ...think about that for a moment. With these criteria almost half the people who got a single injection of saline (or similar inert formulation) reported a systemic adverse reaction.

 

"Severe" reactions (also called grade 3) refer to anything prevents your normal daily activity (and above). So if you take a painkiller for a headache or injection site tenderness or if you feel fatigued and skip a workout or take a nap you've had a "severe" reaction to the vaccine. In this study 17.4% of people reported "severe" reactions after the 2nd injection with the vaccine group and 2.1% for the control. These are almost completely of the headache, fatigue, muscle pain, and joint pain variety. (As an aside, these are all 'symptoms' of a strong immune response and as a result I am a lot more optimistic about the duration of immunity than I was before seeing these data).

 

There is no difference in grade 4 reactions (things that require an ER visit or hospitalization) between vaccine and control groups.

[PeaveyFury]

When you look at results of the studies done on vaccines available currently, the really simple reason is that for healthy and able-bodied people the risk of an averse reaction to the vaccination is probably greater than getting COVID themselves.

 

Do you have actual data to support this claim? Seems a dangerous statement to make unless you have verifiable proof...

 

According to this article (https://www.vox.com/22158238/covid-19-vaccine-side-effects-explained) it looks like...

 

"About 16 percent of people who got the shot in clinical trials experienced a “severe” systemic adverse reaction"

 

Most recent numbers have somewhere around 20.5 million Covid cases in the US vs a population of 328 million, or about a 6.3% infection rate. Now obviously that risk is probably higher for health care workers given their increased chances for exposure, but by how much though? I don't know.

 

Just to add a couple of additional thoughts beyond what homer and Machu offered: I think it's problematic to equate current infection rate with the 'risk of getting the virus', as the current infection rate is ever-increasing. I.E., 6.3% today becomes 6.4% tomorrow and continues to go up with every new case. Obviously, the best way to dramatically slow or stop 'ever-increasing' is through vaccination and eventual herd immunity.

 

The data is a bit dated as it's from the week of Christmas, but at that point there had been ~2.1 million vaccinations administered, and the number of truly 'severe'/life-threatening reactions was 11. Not 11%... eleven total cases. To the best of my knowledge, the 'bad' reactions have largely been in the form of anaphylactic shock, and within subjects who had a history of serious allergic reactions. Again only to the best of my knowledge, all of those people recovered with no further issues following the initial reaction.

 

Obviously, any cases like that aren't ideal, but in the end, that's a minuscule percentage of the total number administered. The other reactions are largely to be expected... I know that every time I get my Tetanus booster, my arm hurts a lot the next day or two, often to the point where I don't use that arm the way I otherwise would. But, I know that the arm pain is insignificant relative to the pain that comes with dying from lockjaw....

[igor67]

I want to highlight how conservative the safety standards are for vaccines. When you look at the range of things included under the term Severe reaction, my experience with Midwestern folks is most of us would still show-up for work under those types of symptoms. That conservative nature is built in to the system because they realize that when you start talking about population wide treatments the millions of people getting the treatment means it has to be way safer than say a random standard surgery. It does lead into some very challenging statistical territory, as you push your real risk territory down into the 1- in a - million territory (literally) it becomes very difficult to actually say what the actual cause was for that particular 1-in a million event.

For whatever its worth I've had anaphylactic reactions [something legitimately serious] due to other medical procedures (not a vaccine) and I plan on getting my shot as soon as I can barring some dramatically new information coming to light.

[homer]

My wife got her first shot and nothing happened. Basically just got a sore arm like she gets with a flu vaccine.

[Fear The Chorizo]

Most of the significant reactions occurred following the 2nd dose during these studies, Moderna in particular - sorry, my ability to link is tardy, but Table 23 of the EUA memorandum on FDA's website is a pretty good reference point. Essentially grade 3 or 4 reactions among the study group jumped from 2% following the 1st dose to 17.4% following the second dose for those who received the vaccine, while the placebo group had similar reactions just 2% of the time following both jabs:

 

https://www.fda.gov/media/144673/download

 

That second round of injections has yet to begin in the US, and there are murmurs that it may be pushed out further and/or lowering the amount of vaccine administered due to a combo of the uneven initial rollout, concerns over a couple highly transmissive COVID variants recently detected that are pushing health officials to recommend using the available vaccine supply to give more people a 1st injection, and concerns of how the side effect profile will look following the 2nd dose - particularly with elderly (80+) and immunocompromised groups of people once they start getting vaccinated in any significant numbers. The prelim data from the studies points to this approach still being pretty effective and better than nothing to provide significant immunity after just one dose, but this altered approach would essentially be a study of its own since the vaccine wouldn't get administered to the level the studies were based upon that led to them being approved for widespread public distribution. Another thing to keep in mind is study groups mirrored age and general health profiles of medical staff much more than nursing home residents/immunocompromised - as very few people over 80 or who would be deemed the most at risk to COVID were part of the test groups (similar to pretty much all initial vaccine studies to determine efficacy/tolerance).

 

The miniscule percentage of cases where allergic reaction occurred following the 1st vaccination should be expected, along with a much larger but still very manageable percentage of cases where the eventual 2nd dose will knock otherwise healthy people on their butts for a day or two. My biggest problem is that there is a lack of consistent communication being delivered to the general public about what to expect so there isn't a freakout over what will be happening over the next couple of months that prolongs when we start seeing a positive impact from the vaccinations.

[homer]

Most of the significant reactions occurred following the 2nd dose during these studies, Moderna in particular - that second round of injections has yet to begin in the US, and there are murmurs that it may be pushed out further and/or lowering the amount of vaccine administered due to a combo of the uneven initial rollout, concerns over a couple highly transmissive COVID variants recently detected that are pushing health officials to recommend using the available vaccine supply to give more people a 1st injection, and concerns of how the side effect profile will look following the 2nd dose - particularly with elderly (80+) and immunocompromised groups of people once they start getting vaccinated in any significant numbers. The prelim data from the studies points to this approach still being pretty effective and better than nothing to provide significant immunity after just one dose, but this altered approach would essentially be a study of its own since the vaccine wouldn't get administered to the level the studies were based upon that led to them being approved for widespread public distribution. Another thing to keep in mind is study groups mirrored age and general health profiles of medical staff much more than nursing home residents/immunocompromised - as very few people over 80 or who would be deemed the most at risk to COVID were part of the test groups (similar to pretty much all initial vaccine studies to determine efficacy/tolerance).

 

The miniscule percentage of cases where allergic reaction occurred following the 1st vaccination should be expected, along with a much larger but still very manageable percentage of cases where the eventual 2nd dose will knock otherwise healthy people on their butts for a day or two. My biggest problem is that there is a lack of consistent communication being delivered to the general public about what to expect so there isn't a freakout over what will be happening over the next couple of months that prolongs when we start seeing a positive impact from the vaccinations.

 

 

Again, please post links to your sources. You continually neglect to do that. It's not fair to ask people to scour the web to track down where you get your info. I have found nothing that agrees with your Moderna second dose claim.

 

Thanks.

[adambr2]

Remember back in Spring/Summer when you were around someone who was around someone who POSSIBLY had COVID-19 and you were telling your contacts, "Hey, I saw Jim a few days ago. Yeah he was around Sally last week and she was at a party with people who tested positive. You may want to get checked."

 

Now it's so widespread that it's "Oh yeah, I saw Jim a few days ago. Yeah, he's positive, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I didn't even think of that."

[JosephC]

Remember back in Spring/Summer when you were around someone who was around someone who POSSIBLY had COVID-19 and you were telling your contacts, "Hey, I saw Jim a few days ago. Yeah he was around Sally last week and she was at a party with people who tested positive. You may want to get checked."

 

Now it's so widespread that it's "Oh yeah, I saw Jim a few days ago. Yeah, he's positive, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I didn't even think of that."

 

Probably because back in the spring people were genuinely scared of the virus. Now I'd guess about 47% of the population sees it as a "bad flu" and another 47% of the population doesn't worry about it because they wear their masks. There is probably only about 5% of the population that is worried about it and those would be the older people in the high risk groups.

[igor67]

homer the link Chorizo included does contain the data. I won't blame anyone for not slogging through the 60+ pages though. Critically though there was no significant increase in the category 4 events, it was only the category 3 events and as Machu had explained those are all symptoms consistent with a vigorous immune response, and certainly things I saw being reported on both ABC and CBS national news as possible side effects. I don't know if they are particularly higher or lower than other common vaccinations at that level of severity.

[homer]

homer the link Chorizo included does contain the data. I won't blame anyone for not slogging through the 60+ pages though. Critically though there was no significant increase in the category 4 events, it was only the category 3 events and as Machu had explained those are all symptoms consistent with a vigorous immune response, and certainly things I saw being reported on both ABC and CBS national news as possible side effects. I don't know if they are particularly higher or lower than other common vaccinations at that level of severity.

 

The link was added later on.

 

Thanks, Chorizo.

[Brian the Automator]

FYI, I've been tracking Wisconsin stats since they've been available. Mainly to track trends statewide as well as Waukesha County (where I'm "blessed" to live).

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EKSItNKNnRlGTLNXbUzGOC-9fVsz9qYAcKCLxdKt4wg/edit#gid=0

[igor67]

That positivity rate is still very high for WI, MN is down into single digits, but still over 5%

[Brian the Automator]

I have fond memories of that day where we were at 5%. In June.

 

Our current 35% is insane. I don't think it's from lack of testing capacity. Apparently Wisconsinites are just stubborn.

[TURBO]

I have fond memories of that day where we were at 5%. In June.

 

Our current 35% is insane. I don't think it's from lack of testing capacity. Apparently Wisconsinites are just stubborn.

 

Stubborn is the polite way of putting it...

 

[CheezWizHed]

I'll take plain stubborn over "MN Nice" which is really passive-aggressiveness -> translation: Stubborn + Lie about it to make you feel good.