Pfizer Vaccine gets full FDA approval and new name.

Post Reply New Topic

In some cases, it is quite reasonable to be concerned with the lack of long-term effects of the vaccine. For example, effects on a foetus during pregnancy.

While I personally don't believe there will be any widespread serious side effects, it is vital that various long term studies are devised and properly followed up. During the swine flu epidemic ten years ago, the vaccine Pandemrix vaccine was found to dramatically increased the risk of narcolepsia in young patients. The link wasn't properly determined until more than a year after the mass vaccination began, as far as I recall.

Given the situation one has to weigh pros against cons. In an ideal world, a pregnant mother wouldn't need to take the vaccine because of risk of infection is very low, but no such world exists.

@Dox47, I don’t recall seeing that before, so thanks. However, despite the volume of signatures, you can’t call it official guidance. It wasn’t. It was people expressing personal opinions, as open letters always are, and the signatories are a pretty varied hodgepodge of average citizens, titled experts and expert wanna-bes. I would agree that their personal opinions got stretched to support the outcome they wanted; human’s do that. I don’t read anything without factoring in the possibility that the author started with a desired outcome.

Still, I don’t think anyone could honestly claim we weren’t getting confusing and conflicting messages at that point in time, and policy often over-reached with restrictions because the knowledge just wasn’t there yet.

Beaches and parks should never have been closed, but we really didn’t know that yet. Experts hadn’t gotten far separating the simple presence of virus from viral loads sufficient to infect a person. Turns out being outdoors is a bigger mitigation to risk than was initially thought. Memorial Day 2020 at the Lake of the Ozark's didn’t turn out to be the super spreader it was expected to be, and neither did the protests. Thankfully we didn’t have the Delta variant yet or the results may have been different.

I didn’t consider the protests safe, but the need to have them was a tsunami that couldn’t be stopped. When I saw an associate posting pictures while at one, I let the office manager know to be extra stringent on the in-office protocols so the risk the one person took wouldn’t transfer (our firm was listed as essential). But I also know that associate’s personal story, and because of that knowledge I felt I couldn’t criticize her activism. I only sought to quietly prevent any possible health risk fall out to others in our firm. Those sorts of quiet decisions were made by many. Everything is a balancing act, after all.

I am immensely relieved to be fully vaccinated and appreciate that Trump had acquired so much supply (I am aware he did so; credit where credit is due). I don’t think it was wise for the government to suggest the vaccinated go mask less when they did; they seem to have believed it would get more people vaccinated, but what it actually seems to have done is create more data on how the Delta variant breaks through, but thankfully with far far less fatal results. Sigh. It is never just the science data.

Vaccination is, at this point, our best chance for moving through this pandemic with as little disruption as possible. Not an end all miracle, but an essential tool. JHMO backed by the science I’ve followed, with my eye on patterns globally and historically.

My wife is a nurse….and can testify that COVID is no “mere flu.”

It has a low mortality rate—but it’s 5 times that of “regular flu.”

Florida has about 8 times the hospitalizations of New York. Their population is about the same as New York’s.