Posted: Sep 28, 2021 10:52 am
Another one, Wilmington, NC.
https://www.wbtv.com/2021/09/27/devastating-shock-uncw-student-brain-dead-due-covid-19-complications-mother-pleads-young-people-get-vaccinated/
He was about to start studying computer science (mentioned in the video, but not the piece). We all know quite a few computer scientists, and it's not a trivial topic in terms of brain-power (I'm sure it's more variable than my experience would suggest, just to avoid charges of naïveté, but it can't be that broad, at least in terms of qualifying grades). Computer scientists have always been at the forefront of my forum-borne education, whether the topic be maths, logic or physics, so it should be a warning to us all.
Even really smart people can fall down dumb rabbit-holes and be sucked in. I've found myself gravitationally-bound to one or two in the course of researching how we think about particular things, and it's a lot easier than you might think to have your thinking coloured in some way. Indeed, the entire basis of cognitive behavioural therapy is to colour your thinking positively as a strategy for avoiding the dark places.
I really hope at least one person takes note, here. I get that it's easy not to trust the government. I wouldn't trust even a good government as far as I could throw it, and certainly not this government, with it's open and rampant racism, misogyny and especially transphobia.
Surely, though, nobody could think any member here, many of whom genuinely understand the science in some considerable detail (I know far more about virology, epidemiology, vaccinology and immunology than I ever wanted to or thought I'd have a use for at this point, even as somebody who's engaged with antivaxxers for a decade and more) as he well knows, would actually wish him harm?
Seriously, dude. Wind your neck in. I want you to have a long life, and a long tenure on the forum. You know I have genuine affection for you, no matter how infuriatingly obtuse you can be, and no matter how robustly I may have expressed my frustration at times.
Every single piece of information required to understand how all this works is right here on this forum. I could list the posts with all the bits of logic you need to grasp all of this, were I to sit down and think carefully about who wrote what. And I mean posts outlining things I'm confident you'd agree with the logic of.
Nobody is trying to harm you, and I promise it's as safe as putting foreign objects in your body can ever be, and many, many orders of magnitude safer than putting some foreign objects in your body unprotected.
Viruses do some funny things, not least because of how they interact. RNA viruses are quite unstable, and especially viruses with shorter genomes, because shorter genomes are fairly strongly correlated with faster rates of evolution. Influenza A evolves at such a rate that the accumulation of differences outruns our vaccines within about two years, but remember that the time component of that is really not a time component, it's generational. Remember the 'serial trials' fallacy, so beautifully exposed by Calilasseia over on RDF and one of the first migrated posts here when this place opened? This is that. The evolution rate of Flu A is governed by how tightly we control outbreaks. Because this virus is currently and to a first approximation everywhere, the whole world is currently tossing coins, and ten heads in a row is coming up time after time after time after...
Honestly, dude. It's a bit of fat and some RNA. It isn't putting anything in your body that isn't in a conventional vaccine, and it's putting in considerably less. It trains your cells to make a specific protein so that your immune system knows what it looks like. The same protein is present in the virus, and also in the attenuated viruses that go into conventional vaccines. In real technological terms, it's properly barn-door in its simplicity, and it is OF NECESSITY safer than conventional viruses.
FYI, because it's so simple, it's really quick to develop and produces new vaccines, because it's a matter of identifying the genes responsible for the production of the business end of any given virus. I saw a piece yesterday that a new flu vaccine is entering trials.
Also worth noting that yesterday, a new cancer treatment drug, Sotorasib, hailed as a gamechanger in oncology, was licensed following phase 3 trials. The phase 3 trial involved 126 patients.
The phase 3 trial for the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine involved 43,548 patients.
Just get the jab, mate. I'd hate to lose you over silliness.
Many of the unvaccinated hope the odds are in their favor, and if they do catch COVID-19, they won’t get that sick. That was the case with Tyler Gilreath, a 20-year-old UNCW student who is now brain dead due to complications he suffered after contracting the virus in mid-August. His family plans to take him off life support Monday evening after doctors harvest his organs.
https://www.wbtv.com/2021/09/27/devastating-shock-uncw-student-brain-dead-due-covid-19-complications-mother-pleads-young-people-get-vaccinated/
He was about to start studying computer science (mentioned in the video, but not the piece). We all know quite a few computer scientists, and it's not a trivial topic in terms of brain-power (I'm sure it's more variable than my experience would suggest, just to avoid charges of naïveté, but it can't be that broad, at least in terms of qualifying grades). Computer scientists have always been at the forefront of my forum-borne education, whether the topic be maths, logic or physics, so it should be a warning to us all.
Even really smart people can fall down dumb rabbit-holes and be sucked in. I've found myself gravitationally-bound to one or two in the course of researching how we think about particular things, and it's a lot easier than you might think to have your thinking coloured in some way. Indeed, the entire basis of cognitive behavioural therapy is to colour your thinking positively as a strategy for avoiding the dark places.
I really hope at least one person takes note, here. I get that it's easy not to trust the government. I wouldn't trust even a good government as far as I could throw it, and certainly not this government, with it's open and rampant racism, misogyny and especially transphobia.
Surely, though, nobody could think any member here, many of whom genuinely understand the science in some considerable detail (I know far more about virology, epidemiology, vaccinology and immunology than I ever wanted to or thought I'd have a use for at this point, even as somebody who's engaged with antivaxxers for a decade and more) as he well knows, would actually wish him harm?
Seriously, dude. Wind your neck in. I want you to have a long life, and a long tenure on the forum. You know I have genuine affection for you, no matter how infuriatingly obtuse you can be, and no matter how robustly I may have expressed my frustration at times.
Every single piece of information required to understand how all this works is right here on this forum. I could list the posts with all the bits of logic you need to grasp all of this, were I to sit down and think carefully about who wrote what. And I mean posts outlining things I'm confident you'd agree with the logic of.
Nobody is trying to harm you, and I promise it's as safe as putting foreign objects in your body can ever be, and many, many orders of magnitude safer than putting some foreign objects in your body unprotected.
Viruses do some funny things, not least because of how they interact. RNA viruses are quite unstable, and especially viruses with shorter genomes, because shorter genomes are fairly strongly correlated with faster rates of evolution. Influenza A evolves at such a rate that the accumulation of differences outruns our vaccines within about two years, but remember that the time component of that is really not a time component, it's generational. Remember the 'serial trials' fallacy, so beautifully exposed by Calilasseia over on RDF and one of the first migrated posts here when this place opened? This is that. The evolution rate of Flu A is governed by how tightly we control outbreaks. Because this virus is currently and to a first approximation everywhere, the whole world is currently tossing coins, and ten heads in a row is coming up time after time after time after...
Honestly, dude. It's a bit of fat and some RNA. It isn't putting anything in your body that isn't in a conventional vaccine, and it's putting in considerably less. It trains your cells to make a specific protein so that your immune system knows what it looks like. The same protein is present in the virus, and also in the attenuated viruses that go into conventional vaccines. In real technological terms, it's properly barn-door in its simplicity, and it is OF NECESSITY safer than conventional viruses.
FYI, because it's so simple, it's really quick to develop and produces new vaccines, because it's a matter of identifying the genes responsible for the production of the business end of any given virus. I saw a piece yesterday that a new flu vaccine is entering trials.
Also worth noting that yesterday, a new cancer treatment drug, Sotorasib, hailed as a gamechanger in oncology, was licensed following phase 3 trials. The phase 3 trial involved 126 patients.
The phase 3 trial for the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine involved 43,548 patients.
Just get the jab, mate. I'd hate to lose you over silliness.