Doug B
Footballguy
Nothing but love, GB ... but this topic can't be so much as approached apolitically. Not even at a highly superficial level.
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You're Nothing But A Number To Them -- Boosters, Bureaucratic Tyranny, and COVID (2 Viewers)
- Thread starter rockaction
- Start date
Pip's Invitation
Footballguy
He's just an angsty dude in general. Some people just are.
I'm not yet convinced boosters are necessary for those who aren't immunocompromised -- though I am willing to change my mind when the evidence is more solid -- but I would never begrudge anyone who thought differently and went out and got one.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
In general I agree with this. Thus far the evidence for mass boosters for the young and healthy isn't conclusive. That doesn't preclude one from discussing boosters with their doctor and getting one. My father likely falls in this boat, as he has an autoimmune disorder and is nearly 75 years old. He'll likely get one and it won't be a huge hassle to do so.
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rockaction
Footballguy
Unless you're traveling. Or immunocompromised. In which case, Canada is already offering the third shot, long before people around the world get their first shot.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/covid19-vaccine-announcement-manitoba-joss-reimer-1.6176433
From the article:
Manitoba is now offering third doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to immunocompromised people and to individuals who may choose to receive a third dose for travel purposes.
Dr. Joss Reimer, medical lead of the province's vaccine implementation task force, made the announcement on Wednesday.
"For those who are immunocompromised, two doses of the vaccine may not provide adequate defence against COVID-19, particularly given concerns with the highly contagious delta variant," she said during a live-streamed news conference.
Effective immediately, third doses are available to anyone who is moderately to severely immunocompromised due to a medical condition and/or medical treatment.
They'll also be available to anyone in Manitoba who wishes to receive a third dose for travel purposes, and anyone who has previously received one or two doses of a vaccine that is not approved by Health Canada.
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rockaction
Footballguy
I say wait until December, when most people come up for their booster shots. Then we'll see about availability. I can put dollars to donuts that the people saying the FDA hasn't curtailed availability will be making cost/benefit or internationalist arguments when the time comes and there are no shots.
I can almost smell the money I'm not placing on it now because I don't gamble coming back to me in spades.
Of course, this all goes away if Joe Biden doesn't heed the FDA and CDC and continues with inoculations apace. That's always an option.
I can almost smell the money I'm not placing on it now because I don't gamble coming back to me in spades.
Of course, this all goes away if Joe Biden doesn't heed the FDA and CDC and continues with inoculations apace. That's always an option.
rockaction
Footballguy
And here we sit, in the PSF.
Runkle
Footballguy
At the start of this, the government lied about masks... Saying they weren't necessary and are ineffective. The truth was masks work but they didn't want people hoarding them before health care workers could get them. Good intentions, but now we're dealing with a situation where people still won't mask up. Now we don't know how many people have been sick or died because of that first lie. Maybe if we started a mask panic at the start, now we'd be in better shape?
Now they say no third dose is necessary. The intention is to get more first doses out to people. But the message sometimes heard from this is "the vaccine is weak and ineffective so a third dose won't help any". Now, that's not true, but that's what is heard. The government is absolutely no lying, the intention is to help, but who knows what the repercussions will be later.
Now they say no third dose is necessary. The intention is to get more first doses out to people. But the message sometimes heard from this is "the vaccine is weak and ineffective so a third dose won't help any". Now, that's not true, but that's what is heard. The government is absolutely no lying, the intention is to help, but who knows what the repercussions will be later.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
I don’t think I got anything different. Certainly didn’t the first 2 shots in January and February.
rockaction
Footballguy
My advice to the youth: Never get your overriding philosophic or political expression from the Germans. Therein lies danger.
rockaction
Footballguy
The anti-vaxxers are out in full force, I see.
I see you guys.
I see you guys.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
In light of some recent posts, maybe some self reflection is appropriate...
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
Yeah, my third dose of Moderna was a full-on third dose. It definitely put me under the weather for about 24 hours. I would have gone to work if it had been a work day, but it wasn't so I just laid around on the couch all day.
For people who are on the fence, in other words not elderly or seriously immunocompromised, it's worth at least considering waiting around a bit to see if they tweak the dosage for boosters. People who know what they're talking about seem pretty confident that a half-dose might be about as a good as a full dose (and maybe even slightly better) with less side effects. In my personal case, it was more important to get a good-enough dose right now than to wait for an optimal dose while I'm sitting at home alone during the long upper Midwest winter.
squistion
Footballguy
Pip's Invitation
Footballguy
Which means up there ^^^ I made my first post in the PSF.
This is my second and last.
BladeRunner
Footballguy
I only care about the lives of my family, the lives of Americans, lives of our allies and then everyone else. In that order. Let's take care of our own first and foremost because those people abroad - they hate our guts anyways. I don't care about them nearly as much as I do the first 3 groups.
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BladeRunner
Footballguy
When did you get your 3rd dose? When did you intially get the shot?
My 6 months is up at the end of October from my booster shot.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
That's a pretty simplistic view of the world, but you're entitled to your opinion.
BladeRunner
Footballguy
Simplistic?
I'd say your never ending quest for virtue points is a pretty shallow and simplistic.
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
2nd dose was in April. 3rd dose was in September. Almost exactly 5 months apart, nearly to the day.
I would have slightly preferred to wait another month or two, but a booster isn't going to do me any good after Thanksgiving because I'll spend the rest of the winter sitting around in my basement like I do every winter.
BladeRunner
Footballguy
Hmmm...are they giving "booster" shots now? I was under the impression it was still under consideration and trial but no one was actually getting them.
Do I need to ask someone to get it? Or do I just go into, say, Walgreens and demand a 3rd shot?
parasaurolophus
Footballguy
I find it ridiculous that they just pick and choose when data is needed vs when data isnt.
rockaction
Footballguy
This. They just assign a data point or points based on their political ends, and they leave it at that.
Let's not jump the gun on Biden and company. He still has ample time and resources to tell the FDA and CDC "Thank you but no thank you" to their recommendations.
Terminalxylem
Footballguy
Saying the third dose is unnecessary for a portion of the population atm isn’t remotely the same thing as saying boosters are useless in perpetuity.
Do you guys tell your doctors how often you should take your medications too?
rockaction
Footballguy
The doctors have spoken about a political distribution of resources right within their report. That the bioethicists have gotten together and decided to solve a problem by addressing equity and vaccine scarcity should sit at the front of the complaint. The effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine has waned. It is time for a third shot rather than acquiescence to death panel-style boards and executive agencies.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
The CDC and NIH aren't just doctors though. They aren't elected and they mostly aren't appointed either. They are technocrats that create public policy recommendations and institute programs within their purview. They have every right to speak about the domestic and international politics of their recommendations.
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Terminalxylem
Footballguy
Meh. If you only knew about the true “death panels”, the ones determing the limits of crisis care, because too many “informed” individuals chose not to be vaccinated at all.
rockaction
Footballguy
rockaction
Footballguy
My ####### God, strike me now.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
I trust technocrats more than our elected officials that have proven to put their own political skin above all else and have sold themselves to the deepest pockets that will fund their campaigns. Maybe if we could have votes of no confidence and some means of holding our elected leaders accountable I might feel differently. But I haven't seen much of that in my lifetime.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
That is the purpose of their existence. Without technocrats creating and informing public policy, we wouldn't have much of a government.
Flash
Footballguy
shadrap
Footballguy
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
Okay, but then let's drop the "follow the science" and "listen to the experts" thing. I'm at least as well-qualified to have an opinion on domestic and international politics as any of these people.
djmich
Footballguy
You know, I never really understood why there were college majors in political science. I guess it shouldn't be surprising that science is now politics.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
I'm unsure about your exact field of expertise, but do you think those that are well educated but outside your field as as well qualified as you are to have an opinion about the topics you study? Should their educated but unstudied opinion have equal weight as yours?
parasaurolophus
Footballguy
What the hell is going on here? Are you saying that when public health/agency people make glaringly obvious idiotic decisions that we should just trust that?
You guys act like public health has all sorts of experience dealing with super deadly global pandemics.
In fact the experience level of every single one of them is exactly zero.
All the previous were either too deadly that they fizzled or they werent really that deadly.
This crop of public health rubes actually forgot a lot of the valuable lessons from the spanish flu.
They are far more focused on equity than they are on actual mitigation and that is pathetic.
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
It depends on what we're talking about. I'm a microeconomist. If somebody from outside my discipline wants to have a debate over how to properly deflate price data, I probably won't listen. If they want to have an argument about whether the Fed should give more weight to fighting inflation vs. the alternate goal of maintaining full employment, I don't see what possible objection I could have to that. You don't really need much or even any technical expertise to have an opinion on what kind of goals policy makers should prioritize over others.
Moving to virology, if a virologist tells me that SARS-CoV-2 is uniquely dangerous to humans because of the configuration of its Johnson rod, I can't evaluate that statement. But if a virologist tells me that we should allocate vaccine doses to Country X instead of Country Y, I feel very confident jumping back into the conversation, because there's no special training that you get in virology school that makes one an expert on the proper allocation of health care services. That's the sort of issue that we routinely resolve through the democratic process.
And of course when it comes to data analysis, there are lots of people in lots of fields who have all taken more or less the same statistics courses. We all know what (X'X)-1X'Y signifies. All of us are pretty interchangeable when the discussion turns to confidence intervals. Do I defer to virologists on that sort of thing? Of course not. We have the same textbooks sitting on our bookshelves.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
@IvanKaramazov, that's a far cry from your statement of, "let's drop the 'follow the science' and 'listen to the experts' thing".
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
I don't think so. If the FDA panel wants to base their recommendations on concerns about vaccine equity, that's okay but I don't concede that they have any special expertise in that area. Certainly not any expertise that millions of educated people don't also have.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
I don't think that the CDC was more focused on equity than mitigation. Rather, I think that they have tried to strike a balance.
Honestly, I shouldn't be defending the CDC. They've ####ed up royally many times over. I guess I just don't like the Monday morning quarterbacking from lay people that think they are experts.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
What about trying to strike a balance between mitigation and equity and creating models of such? Do they have the expertise to do so?
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
It depends. This is probably more of a continuum and less of a binary thing. On one pole you have stuff that's strictly science, like how a virus works and what a protein spike is and a bunch of other stuff that I'm not even aware of. On the other pole you have stuff that's not science at all, like how American policy makers should weigh American lives vs. non-American lives. There's a bunch of stuff in between those extremes.
In your example, I would probably not feel especially qualified to talk about how best to model the effects of mitigation efforts, but I would feel very qualified to comment on the assumptions baked into the model regarding equity and what implications might follow from those assumptions.
Mainly, though, is that I don't think it works to tell people to "follow the science" when your policy recommendations are based on things that are not science. It's a fallacious appeal to authority.
IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
Maybe a different example would better illustrate what I'm getting at. Consider the question of vaccine-mixing. Is it a good idea for a person who got the J&J vaccine to run out and get a Moderna booster?
I think bench scientists can provide invaluable assistance in answering this question. If several vaccine researchers tell me that the J&J vaccine includes an ingredient that bursts into flames when it comes into contact with a particular ingredient in the Moderna booster, such that vaccine mixing will instantly kill the patient, that sounds like a bad thing and maybe we shouldn't try it. I would be very happy that the experts set me straight.
On the other hands, let's say that the scientists all agree that there's no theoretical reason to think that vaccine mixing is dangerous. So we conduct a trial (health care experts will know way more than I do about how to construct a good RCT -- social scientists don't typically do that sort of thing and we don't get trained in it) and gather data. Once we get data, I don't need to defer to the scientists any more. I can handle the data analysis on my own.
Does that make sense? This is a long-winded way of saying that there are times to defer to "the experts" and times when there's no need to do so.
I think bench scientists can provide invaluable assistance in answering this question. If several vaccine researchers tell me that the J&J vaccine includes an ingredient that bursts into flames when it comes into contact with a particular ingredient in the Moderna booster, such that vaccine mixing will instantly kill the patient, that sounds like a bad thing and maybe we shouldn't try it. I would be very happy that the experts set me straight.
On the other hands, let's say that the scientists all agree that there's no theoretical reason to think that vaccine mixing is dangerous. So we conduct a trial (health care experts will know way more than I do about how to construct a good RCT -- social scientists don't typically do that sort of thing and we don't get trained in it) and gather data. Once we get data, I don't need to defer to the scientists any more. I can handle the data analysis on my own.
Does that make sense? This is a long-winded way of saying that there are times to defer to "the experts" and times when there's no need to do so.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
But as you said, it's non-binary and a continuum so in some cases it's OK to appeal to authority and sometimes it's not and sometimes it's in between.
As I said in this thread or the other that seems identical, the alternative is to rely on elected leaders to make these policy choices and I have little faith that they are acting in anything than their own personal self-serving political interests. Yes, that's patently undemocratic, but I am unable to square that with the reality that the representative democracy that we've constructed has little means to hold elected officials accountable for their decisions. At least technocrats can be fired.
rockaction
Footballguy
I totally agree with IK about, quite specifically, his assertion that we should follow experts in their field of study but when they crossover into other fields that they're subject to review by people in other disciplines, especially those that specialize in that discipline.
Friedrich Hayek wrote about this. It has been expounded by others. An expert in one field is merely an intellectual in another, a dilettante. It is best to remember that. When health experts begin to determine what is a moral or ethical distribution, one should question that on the moral and ethical grounds of the proposed distribution, not defer to them as "experts."
If they are saying to distribute the vaccine in order that the distribution reduces death rates for the world because of the way virology works, then we should listen. Expertise like that is what we should heed. Once they wade into the "vaccine equity" debate, we should debate their notions of what consists of "equity" and the like because they are not "experts" in the fields of equity or distribution.
Friedrich Hayek wrote about this. It has been expounded by others. An expert in one field is merely an intellectual in another, a dilettante. It is best to remember that. When health experts begin to determine what is a moral or ethical distribution, one should question that on the moral and ethical grounds of the proposed distribution, not defer to them as "experts."
If they are saying to distribute the vaccine in order that the distribution reduces death rates for the world because of the way virology works, then we should listen. Expertise like that is what we should heed. Once they wade into the "vaccine equity" debate, we should debate their notions of what consists of "equity" and the like because they are not "experts" in the fields of equity or distribution.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
Who are the experts to weigh in on the equity debate? You and @IvanKaramazov already disparaged bioethicists, which seem to be the discipline best placed to be an expert on the topic. Also, there are experts in the field of public health that work on vaccine distribution. Should we listen to them in this equity debate?
rockaction
Footballguy
I can't speak for IK, so this is only for me. I think "bioethics" is a discipline that is both
- an applied discipline
- one that has become corrupted by a particular school of thought
I look at the disciplines in a taxonomic way, as I'm sure many others do or many others will find fault with.
As far as its corruption, the weird utilitarian arguments coming out of bioethics programs are famously odd. Witness Pete Singer out of Princeton, who argued for infanticide. He was considered by many a leader in the field of bioethics until then.
I'm not hitching my star to that "movement," which seems to have been ideologically captured by monstrous (as IK pointed out in another thread) people.
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IvanKaramazov
Footballguy
I don't think there is such a thing as "expertise" when it comes to the debate over vaccine equity. Any educated person can weigh in on that one with a perfectly reasonable point of view. It's exactly, 100% like "Should the Fed prioritize stable prices or should it focus instead on full employment?" Nobody really needs any special training to comment on that -- just a good, general undergraduate education will suffice.
The Z Machine
Footballguy
sure, lots of people can weight in to the conversation, but the devil is in the details, no? Details like the mechanisms for the distribution (central vs. distributed, public vs. private) and the monitoring of vaccine uptake to address gaps in coverage by demographics and geography. The people that are facile with that data are public health officials and researchers, no? Is you issue that these people have opinions on policy rather than just being data and analysis gophers?
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