Delta Variant Game Changer

COVID-19
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I have. My loved ones are all vaccinated. I honestly am unaware of a single person in my social circles that is unvaccinated- aside from ineligible children. No one has died or had adverse reactions to the vaccine. I know of multiple people in my social circles with long COVID-19 or with parents who died of COVID-19 before vaccines were available.

I stand by my statement earlier:

I can’t tell if you’ve been horribly misinformed or if you’re attempting to confuse people into distrusting everything. That is generally how misinformation is most effective.

The misinformer doesn’t need to convince others of anything in order to have an impact. They merely need to make others distrust institutions in order to sow chaos. Unfortunately, such chaos in this instance can result in illness and death.

Here is a link to CDC website dispelling vaccine myths:

In case you are simply the misinformed and not a true misinformer, here is a resource from the UK government to help you identify if the sources you are using are actually reliable:

In addition, please consider who benefits from your sowing misinformation.

VAERS clearly states:

“ When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event…

…A report to VAERS generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. VAERS accepts all reports without judging whether the event was caused by the vaccine.”

https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html

An additional disclaimer:

“ Key considerations and limitations of VAERS data:

  • Vaccine providers are encouraged to report any clinically significant health problem following vaccination to VAERS, whether or not they believe the vaccine was the cause.
  • Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.
  • The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted or used to reach conclusions about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.
  • VAERS data is limited to vaccine adverse event reports received between 1990 and the most recent date for which data are available.
  • VAERS data do not represent all known safety information for a vaccine and should be interpreted in the context of other scientific information.

VAERS data available to the public include only the initial report data to VAERS. Updated data which contains data from medical records and corrections reported during follow up are used by the government for analysis. However, for numerous reasons including data consistency, these amended data are not available to the public.”

https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html

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Not naming names, but I get upset when I see anti-vaccine quackery infiltrating our forums. I’ve called it our before - the strategy is to overwhelm with questionable and fallacious information and then ask people to evaluate it - and I had my hand slapped. At that time I was given the opportunity to rewrite it, but chose not to, letting it get removed.

Granted, there is, and we can have, legitimate debate, but how do you, or we in the forum, deal with individuals spreading disinformation? These are not people that facts can sway, but people intent on a particular line of argument…

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I’m with you on this one, @JamesIgoe, and have flagged one comment above for both walking and talking like a duck. I support science, math and critical thinking, not the dumbed down pseudo-evidence wafting from a fever-swamp.

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I think you should let the above comment stand. I don’t think it’s disinformation so much as his view of information.

There are deaths from the vaccine, there are side effects, there is a problem for some of the population. I was extremely hesitant because I am allergic to over 20 drugs. I don’t get vaccinated. I have always felt if people want to get them fine, but I don’t.

But I had an understanding that with covid which in all probability escaped because of a lab mistake, that we have no immunity at all so how can out immune systems respond completely or I guess fast enough to do us any good? Especially since it looked like you were a sitting duck if you were older, or numerous other issues as well.

I don’t trust a doctor telling me something, I used to go to a seminar and have 20 doctors say 20 different things. I know doctors that got paid to testify that were just happy to get money for it. Too many doctors I’ve had personally have made mistakes. Nor do I trust the government or politicians who will just promote something because it is in their best interests. And forget the CDC, they have been all over the place and don’t know what they are doing half the time right now. And I certainly don’t trust Big Pharma who in numerous cases has hid side effects for years. It isn’t even until fairly recently that they have to register they are doing a trial beforehand to use the information because they used to bury the trials they didn’t like. So distrust out there? It’s huge. And you won’t solve the issue until you understand the issue. But you can’t just sweep it under the rug and say just believe me.

This whole situation has not been helped by people first being told don’t trust any vaccine that Trump has okayed, to then being told now that I’m in office trust it???
Get a vaccine but by the way you might get some temporary symptoms and then you can easily read nowadays of the people that are in bed still not feeling good 2 weeks later. While that’s a small number it’s the squeaky wheel thing. You hear about it. Why do you think there is such a huge range of people that have chosen not to get it? Add to that, you might get sick for a few days and you are young and need to work so what is the compelling reason? Except now that we have more younger people getting sick they might start paying attention more. And a bigger group of the unvaccinated are the younger age groups.

We have one of the highest vaccination rates and we are getting a huge surge of people that are sick. The vaccine is working for most to not get seriously sick luckily but one of the biggest groups of the unvaccinated is kids. Even the kids that are able to (12-18) the rate is low about 20%. Because there is that doubt still even among vaccinated parents to not trust getting the vaccine for their kids.

But you can’t just say I disagree with this and get someone to believe you. A lot of his information is right, it’s just not the whole story. But it’s how he views it and it’s how a lot view it.

I have gotten vaccinated, I believe in this case covid was way more the riskier option without being vaccinated, but I believe we still need to value the freedom of choice.

And I think an awful lot of people unvaccinated are going to get sick.

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Good news! Britain is going to start giving booster shots. We should have more data soon if that works. They are thinking about giving a different vaccine than the original because it might enhance immunity more. I know one of my doctors in the US wants a booster and was thinking of sneaking one in since they are widely available now. Plus some immune compromised people are sneaking in a third shot to see if it helps more.

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I agree with @JamesIgoe. I do not think that this is the forum to combat heaps of vaccine misinformation point-by-point.

I very much disagree. She/He specifically states that COVID vaccines are not actually vaccines.

I feel like people could be going down the “alternative facts” rabbit hole after reading stuff like that.

Facts are facts. The CDC has its problems for sure, but there is no doubt that the primary purpose of all of the FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines is to protect against infection and severe illness from COVID-19.

The risk of not soundly shutting down the misinformation posted is much greater than leaving it up. That is - risking offending him/her or risking many people becoming misinformed from reading that post.

It is intensely time consuming to do the research to dispute each and every falsehood she/he posted.

While I appreciate you posting your journey to choosing to take the vaccine, you also legitimized all of his/her points when you said this:

In order for misinformation to be effective- the misinformer has to mix in just enough “right” or accurate information in order to sound believable.

I consider a post like his/hers to be exceptionally dangerous.

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At the beginning of the Pandemic, SOME people were saying everyone would eventually get it. And that was before we knew what kind of timeline there would be for the vaccines, and how effective they would be. At that time, we were also discussing herd immunity coming from the vaccines once they arrived. The attitude that we should just embrace getting it makes no sense. What if we said that about smallpox or Polio? The vaccines would help us achieve herd immunity if 40% of our population were not stuck in some kind of denial about the public health benefits of getting vaccinated. The main reason to get vaccinated is not your own health. It is to protect the wellbeing of the public. A vaccine is a public health remedy (as are masks in public spaces), first and foremost, as well as a personal health decision. I wish people would understand this, and stop talking about " personal freedom." It is about consideration of your fellow humans, plain and simple.

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Welcome to TuD, @MichaelJohn63! You chose to weigh in on a controversial topic and I definitely agree with the moral concept that we each share a personal responsibility for the well-being of fellow humans, even strangers.

I could go on but will exercise some restraint and simply encourage you to engage with some of the more practical aspects of living with diabetes. What is your connection to diabetes?

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Yeah, I thought about this being my first post here.

Thanks for chiming in. I have Type 1 diabetes, adult onset, diagnosed 23 years ago, at the age of 33. I had visited this site to look for information on night time high BG issues I am having, which I will address in a separate post.

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As it relates to ivermectin, previously mentioned, which a few weeks ago garnered some positive press, a recent developmental, or rather reversal. I was aware of this, and although skeptical, was keeping an open mind. This closes it, although leaving it slightly ajar, if only to see subsequent responses…

Flawed ivermectin preprint highlights challenges of COVID drug studies (nature.com)

The paper summarized the results of a clinical trial seeming to show that ivermectin can reduce COVID-19 death rates by more than 90%1 — among the largest studies of the drug’s ability to treat COVID-19 to date. But on 14 July, after internet sleuths raised concerns about plagiarism and data manipulation, the preprint server Research Square withdrew the paper because of “ethical concerns”.

The paper’s irregularities came to light when Jack Lawrence, a master’s student at the University of London, was reading it for a class assignment and noticed that some phrases were identical to those in other published work. When he contacted researchers who specialize in detecting fraud in scientific publications, the group found other causes for concern, including dozens of patient records that seemed to be duplicates, inconsistencies between the raw data and the information in the paper, patients whose records indicate they died before the study’s start date, and numbers that seemed to be too consistent to have occurred by chance.

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