1. #28441
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    The comparisons to smallpox are particularly bad, since the techniques that work on one phage won't automatically have an analogue with another. Particularly as smallpox doesn't have, for instance, animal reservoirs, while COVID does.
    Each excuse you make for covid being as endemic is valid, and indeed also used as criticism by antivaxxers. It's two sides of the same coin. Can't be helped.

    What matters to me, and what should matter to anyone else, is that indeed many of these excuses/criticisms do not apply to monkeypox. Which means that we need an entirely new mode of communication to get people to recognise that this massive ineffectual effort we applied to covid while knowing it's an endemic disease are also the same measures that are able to eradicate monkeypox.

    You recognise that monkeypox is different. But you dismiss them because it makes the covid approach look more hopeless in comparison. It's understandable, but it's also a sunk cost fallacy. Zero monkeypox is achievable. It's not even difficult. But it's not happening as long as people associate those measures with the results of covid measures.

  2. #28442
    Titan Yunru's Avatar
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    You would think that a record heat (45*C) will kill off this virus, but it went from 20 Jun (400 infections) to 28 Jul (1690).

    And yes people dont wear masks any more and it shows.
    Don't sweat the details!!!

  3. #28443
    Quote Originally Posted by Iain View Post
    A headstart is not an advantage!

    You can keep vaccinating the entire globe with these covid vaccines several times a year for a thousand years and you won't come anywhere near the spectacular results of polio and smallpox vaccines eradicating the disease.

    It's been two years since the development on the first strain started and we're still using that same vaccine today.

    Even Fauci himself said we'll need entirely different types of vaccines if we want general covid vaccinations rather than chasing mutations that are as good as gone by the time you update the vaccine.

    Just don't do it. Smallpox vaccines gives us the means to eradicate several diseases and all their strains, don't try to draw parallels with a vaccine that inherently can't.

    If you want to claim success, then point at the speed of development and the impressive scale at which the covid vaccines have been rolled out. That's a logistical wonder and deserves to be recognised.

    Do you even realize how many changes to the small pox vaccine have been implemented?

    Heck we are already on the 3rd generation of some major changes to that vaccine while we are only on the 2nd year of the covid vaccine.

    Each major change which improved effectiveness and improved safety took decades, not years.
    Buh Byeeeeeeeeeeee !!

  4. #28444
    Quote Originally Posted by Zan15 View Post
    You mean how surprisingly long the approval process is and how it doesn't need to be that long?

    How there is such a backlog because the appropriate divisions of the govt are not funded enough?

    How something can just jump the line in the approval process to get priority handling like never before in history?

    You realize most of the delay in getting these things to market are caused on purpose, right? Like marketing, product pipeline, product funding plans, govt backlog, etc etc.
    They are not "on purpose" as some kind of weird conspiracy.

    For covid-vaccines FDA-personnel spent thanksgiving reading the reports - that's not how it is normally done.

    And lots of drugs fail in phase I, phase II, or even phase-III, so you often don't start the next phase until you see that the first one worked - here they ignored that and combined phases, which would have been money down the drain if the vaccines totally failed, but that risk was deemed worth it. Especially you don't normally build a plant and produce millions of doses of a drug, and then wait for approval as was done here. (And, sometimes it failed and millions of doses had to be given away.) Similarly it normally takes time to recruit volunteers - it was a non-issue here.

    The reason companies did that was in part due to to governments (pre-orders and similar contracts) and partially because the companies also understood the importance.

    As part of that there were rolling reviews so that FDA began reading parts of the documents before the trial was completed - if the trial had failed that would also had been wasted effort.

    Given that previous mRNA-vaccines hadn't even gotten to phase III that was pretty bold. (A different mRNA-drug had been approved.)

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Iain View Post
    The smallpox vaccine offers sterilizing immunity. Just like the polio vaccine it has shown itself to be able to eradicate these diseases from most of the world entirely.
    The smallpox vaccine doesn't guarantee sterilizing immunity, as CDC describes it at 95% effective in preventing infection.
    The idea with sterilizing immunity is that it should totally stop the spread - polio was partially eradicated with a vaccine that could spread the polio.

    Basically if everyone is vaccinated the spread of the disease will be so low that it doesn't matter if a few could in theory get a small infection or not. People have noticed that e.g. measles vaccines don't fully stop the infection.

    More importantly monkeypox/smallpox and covid-19 are different viruses: one is a large double-stranded DNA-virus, the other a small respiratory single-stranded RNA-virus. All of those factors matter - it is as if the respiratory immune systems and such small viruses have evolved to be in a constant state of flux.

    Quote Originally Posted by Iain View Post
    All the logic that was used to push the covid vaccine on the public, it all appies to monkeypox right now. Masking, washing your hands, socially distancing and indeed vaccinating. It prevents the spread where the covid vaccine could not.
    Masking, and physical distancing seems quite unimportant for monkeypox, as it mostly requires physical contact.

    And on the other hand I'm still not sure if people have found that handwashing matters much for covid (but it certainly helps with some other diseases, and especially early on it was good to reduce those diseases). (Actually looking at meta-studies it seems the result is still unclear - especially as people knowing about covid-19 caused them to wash their hands and take other precautions.)

    And the approved vaccines for monkeypox is only estimated to be 85% effective - but in contrast to covid-19 vaccines it may be taken post-exposure (as stated - different viruses).

  5. #28445
    Titan Yunru's Avatar
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    So any report on this virus now just totaly died. Its like it doesnt exist.

    However numbers here are rising:
    22 aug -- 1606
    15 sept -- 2005
    5 oct -- 2293

    What i find interesting however is how virus heat by date went down from 2630 cases to 567 and then it jumped back when cold weather/rain happened.
    Also people totaly forgot to wear masks now....

    Only half of population is fully vaccinated.
    Don't sweat the details!!!

  6. #28446
    Quote Originally Posted by Yunru View Post
    Also people totaly forgot to wear masks now....
    Most of us didn't "forget".

  7. #28447
    Quote Originally Posted by Yunru View Post
    Also people totaly forgot to wear masks now....
    People only tend to wear masks when they are told to.

    I'm all for wearing masks but I don't wear one unless the government advises people to wear one, which they currently don't.

  8. #28448
    The Unstoppable Force Mayhem's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yunru View Post
    So any report on this virus now just totaly died. Its like it doesnt exist.

    However numbers here are rising:
    22 aug -- 1606
    15 sept -- 2005
    5 oct -- 2293

    What i find interesting however is how virus heat by date went down from 2630 cases to 567 and then it jumped back when cold weather/rain happened.
    Also people totaly forgot to wear masks now....

    Only half of population is fully vaccinated.
    The world is hard at work trying to produce the one variant that finally kills off half the population or so.

    Wait, I think I have a chart here for what variants are currently around..

    Quote Originally Posted by ash
    So, look um, I'm not a grief counselor, but if it's any consolation, I have had to kill and bury loved ones before. A bunch of times actually.
    Quote Originally Posted by PC2 View Post
    I never said I was knowledge-able and I wouldn't even care if I was the least knowledge-able person and the biggest dumb-ass out of all 7.8 billion people on the planet.

  9. #28449
    Herald of the Titans Tuor's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by diller View Post
    People only tend to wear masks when they are told to.

    I'm all for wearing masks but I don't wear one unless the government advises people to wear one, which they currently don't.
    I had to go yeaterday to a public service, i was the only one using a mask there, no one told me or even demanded me to use it, its just i still haven't got covid and i don't have plans to get it if i can avoid. I also no longer use the mask on a daily base, its just in places where are huge concentration of unknown people.

  10. #28450
    Titan Yunru's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tuor View Post
    I had to go yeaterday to a public service, i was the only one using a mask there, no one told me or even demanded me to use it, its just i still haven't got covid and i don't have plans to get it if i can avoid. I also no longer use the mask on a daily base, its just in places where are huge concentration of unknown people.
    Yeah same here. Bus, shops and hospitals.
    Also since i started wearing mask i got way less sick than usualy over the year.


    This is interesting tho:


    China tourist CCPV trap.
    Don't sweat the details!!!

  11. #28451
    Kinda lost track of how many Covid vaccine shots I had. According to my record, 5 shots. The fifth one (Moderna bivalence) was together with my flu, pneumonia, tetanus and shingle in late September. Five different vaccines in one day.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Yunru View Post
    Yeah same here. Bus, shops and hospitals.
    Also since i started wearing mask i got way less sick than usualy over the year.


    This is interesting tho:

    China tourist CCPV trap.
    Why do you think expats are leaving China? Actually, even the Chinese, those who can, are leaving China.

  12. #28452
    Quote Originally Posted by Mayhem View Post
    The world is hard at work trying to produce the one variant that finally kills off half the population or so.
    Except that the recent variants aren't more deadly - just more contagious, and we can see that peaks in hospitalizations and especially deaths are just a fraction of previous peaks in almost all countries (obviously vaccinations and prior infections help reduce those rates).

    Obviously, things can get darker during the winter.

  13. #28453
    The Unstoppable Force Mayhem's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Forogil View Post
    Except that the recent variants aren't more deadly - just more contagious, and we can see that peaks in hospitalizations and especially deaths are just a fraction of previous peaks in almost all countries (obviously vaccinations and prior infections help reduce those rates).

    Obviously, things can get darker during the winter.
    Yep, recent variants aren't more deadly until they are, and then whoops. The just more contagious bit is the thing that should worry everyone, but no, it doesn't because people seem to be of the ludicrous idea that a virus cares for its host or some other fairy tale nonsense.
    Quote Originally Posted by ash
    So, look um, I'm not a grief counselor, but if it's any consolation, I have had to kill and bury loved ones before. A bunch of times actually.
    Quote Originally Posted by PC2 View Post
    I never said I was knowledge-able and I wouldn't even care if I was the least knowledge-able person and the biggest dumb-ass out of all 7.8 billion people on the planet.

  14. #28454
    Quote Originally Posted by Mayhem View Post
    Yep, recent variants aren't more deadly until they are, and then whoops. The just more contagious bit is the thing that should worry everyone, but no, it doesn't because people seem to be of the ludicrous idea that a virus cares for its host or some other fairy tale nonsense.
    A virus doesn't care for its host, but they "care" for themselves.

    For most viruses that mean they prioritize being contagious - and deadliness is just something that happens. Coronaviruses have been around for a long time - ten thousand or possibly hundreds of millions of years (the science is a bit unclear), and the respiratory system is designed to handle frequent viral infections and generally keep them contained.

  15. #28455
    Quote Originally Posted by Mayhem View Post
    Yep, recent variants aren't more deadly until they are, and then whoops. The just more contagious bit is the thing that should worry everyone, but no, it doesn't because people seem to be of the ludicrous idea that a virus cares for its host or some other fairy tale nonsense.
    That's not what anyone says.

    What people say is that evolution does not favor deadlier viruses. It favors viruses that keep the host alive to spread itself.
    "stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
    -ynnady

  16. #28456
    The Unstoppable Force Mayhem's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Forogil View Post
    A virus doesn't care for its host, but they "care" for themselves.

    For most viruses that mean they prioritize being contagious - and deadliness is just something that happens. Coronaviruses have been around for a long time - ten thousand or possibly hundreds of millions of years (the science is a bit unclear), and the respiratory system is designed to handle frequent viral infections and generally keep them contained.
    The coronavirus is contagious days prior to causing symptoms. So it got that part already going, everything that's happening after is of no interest to the virus but to us it is.
    Quote Originally Posted by ash
    So, look um, I'm not a grief counselor, but if it's any consolation, I have had to kill and bury loved ones before. A bunch of times actually.
    Quote Originally Posted by PC2 View Post
    I never said I was knowledge-able and I wouldn't even care if I was the least knowledge-able person and the biggest dumb-ass out of all 7.8 billion people on the planet.

  17. #28457
    Quote Originally Posted by Mayhem View Post
    The coronavirus is contagious days prior to causing symptoms. So it got that part already going, everything that's happening after is of no interest to the virus but to us it is.
    The latter doesn't follow - that the virus is contagious prior to causing symptoms doesn't mean that it stops being contagious once you show symptoms.

  18. #28458
    The Unstoppable Force Mayhem's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Forogil View Post
    The latter doesn't follow - that the virus is contagious prior to causing symptoms doesn't mean that it stops being contagious once you show symptoms.
    I never said it stops being contagious.

    I said what happens to the host down the line is of no interest to the virus because the one thing it cares about, the spreading, is already at work.

    Most if not all countries are fighting this from the worst possible angle, bolstered by people that think a virus would never kill their host because it needs it to survive.
    Quote Originally Posted by ash
    So, look um, I'm not a grief counselor, but if it's any consolation, I have had to kill and bury loved ones before. A bunch of times actually.
    Quote Originally Posted by PC2 View Post
    I never said I was knowledge-able and I wouldn't even care if I was the least knowledge-able person and the biggest dumb-ass out of all 7.8 billion people on the planet.

  19. #28459
    Quote Originally Posted by Mayhem View Post
    I never said it stops being contagious.

    I said what happens to the host down the line is of no interest to the virus because the one thing it cares about, the spreading, is already at work.
    That makes no sense, since the virus still spreads after people show symptoms the virus benefits from that post-symptomatic spread as well - so the virus wants to improve that.

    It's like saying 'I got the appetizer, so I have eaten and thus I don't care about the main course or dessert'.

  20. #28460
    The Unstoppable Force Mayhem's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Forogil View Post
    That makes no sense, since the virus still spreads after people show symptoms the virus benefits from that post-symptomatic spread as well - so the virus wants to improve that.

    It's like saying 'I got the appetizer, so I have eaten and thus I don't care about the main course or dessert'.
    The virus is not a thing that has a plan. It doesn't wait for anything. It spreads and the evolutionary part is done, there is no care, no thought, no consideration, nothing. It spreads, it evolves, that's what it does and since it spreads prior to causing symptoms whatever happens to the host after is not of any importance because its prime purpose is already fulfilled.

    That the virus keeps spreading after causing symptoms is a bonus, it's a nice to have, but not a need.
    Quote Originally Posted by ash
    So, look um, I'm not a grief counselor, but if it's any consolation, I have had to kill and bury loved ones before. A bunch of times actually.
    Quote Originally Posted by PC2 View Post
    I never said I was knowledge-able and I wouldn't even care if I was the least knowledge-able person and the biggest dumb-ass out of all 7.8 billion people on the planet.

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