SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Ohio lawmakers want to abolish vaccine requirements:
[...] Lawmakers are working on legislation to call off the lottery immediately. They're also trying to head off any plans for "vaccine passports." And last month, they introduced a sweeping antivaccination bill that would essentially demolish public health and vaccination requirements in the state—and not just requirements for COVID-19 vaccines, requirements for any vaccine.
[...] State Rep. Beth Liston (D-Dublin) blasted the bill, telling The Columbus Dispatch, "Not only would it prevent schools, businesses and communities from putting safety measures in pace related to COVID, it will impact the health of our children... This bill applies to all vaccines—polio, measles, meningitis, etc. If it becomes law we will see worsening measles outbreaks, meningitis in the dorms, and children once again suffering from polio."
[...] "At its core, this proposal would destroy our current public health framework that prevents outbreaks of potentially lethal diseases, threatens the stability of our economy as it recovers from a devastating pandemic and jeopardizes the way we live, learn, work and celebrate life," the letter said.
[...] "HB 248 would put all Ohioans at risk while increasing the cost of health care for families, individuals and businesses," spokesperson Dan Williamson said. "This proposal applies to all immunizations, including childhood vaccines. If passed, this legislation could reverse decades of immunity from life-threatening, but vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, hepatitis, meningitis and tuberculosis."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Friday May 28 2021, @11:55AM (50 children)
It burns! Anti intellectualism will be the downfall of this country. Time to buy stock in iron lung and wheelchair companies I guess.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday May 28 2021, @01:09PM (4 children)
So I'm not in the US and don't know much about Ohio, but this news report has me asking, Ohio would be pretty rabidly Republican then?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Friday May 28 2021, @01:34PM (3 children)
What happens is the major cities are pretty heavy on the democrats and the rest of the state is rural and republican. Due to republican gerrymandering they carve up pockets of the cities down to the street level to benefit their party.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @09:19PM
Street level is too nice. In some states they cut single city blocks into multiple precincts if they have too many complexes on them.
(Score: 2) by deathlyslow on Saturday May 29 2021, @07:53PM (1 child)
To be fair both parties suck and do the same thing at different times. It just depends on who has more power at the time. Think pendulum. The only winners are the politicians. Peons being helped is only a happy accident.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Thursday June 03 2021, @11:01PM
To follow up this, MN leans fairly Democrat and we have Gerrymanders here too.
But then again, our Democrat governor removed all the covid / mask / vaccination requirements a wile back. He just put out a set of unenforced recommendations. I'm not complaining. People are pretty reasonable and we don't need covid passports or a nanny state.
But I do suspect that if we had been a red state I would have read about it in the national news.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @02:17PM (34 children)
Some time you should actually ask people why they support things instead of just straw manning everybody outside of your bubble.
If one were to list the most corrupt entities in this country, politicians and big pharma would come pretty near the top. Vaccine mandates open the door for you to combine these two actors and then create scenarios where they can pass laws generating what would amount to trillions of dollars in revenue. In the past this has never been an issue, because vaccine mandates were few and far between and (with a handful of exceptions) were generally only used for extremely dangerous diseases like small pox and polio. Small pox kills about 30% of people infected with it. COVID, by contrast, is relatively harmless for the non-elderly, and even for the elderly the mortality rate peaks around 10%. Not something to shrug off, but also nothing like polio or smallpox, to say the least. And the vaccines for smallpox and polio are not only extremely effective at yielding immunity (and not just a reduction of severe outcomes), but they also last an extremely long time - generally your lifetime.
This bill is not about prohibiting vaccines, but about prohibiting the requirements of such. It is anti-authoritarianism. If you would like to put anything into your body, you should be able to do so. However, you also should not be able to tell other people what they should put into *their* body. Vaccines have always been about individuals protecting themselves, herd immunity a nice aside. This has not changed, though the rhetoric has. If you believe COVID is a high risk and the vaccines are low risk then feel free to vaccinate. And for many people this will be technically true. By contrast, for many individuals COVID is a low risk and the vaccines are a low risk - which means the exact calculus of what should be done is much more complex.
And finally, this also hasn't even hit on the fact that politicians are not "following the science." People who already have natural immunity to COVID through previous infection are showing negligible rates of reinfection and when reinfected the severity is mild to negligible. Demanding all people, including these, is something worse than authoritarian because it's quite hard to argue that it's being done in good faith.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Friday May 28 2021, @03:18PM (22 children)
You are already required to vaccinate your children upon registering them for public school. How is this any different? I'm sure the people who support this really have a background in biology and medicine to understand it.
Yeah relatively harmless Covid, only 593,000 dead. But hey I guess they were all circling the drain to begin with...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:00PM (4 children)
Well it's macabre, but yes - the vast majority of them were "circling the drain" so to speak. Don't forget that in the US each year about 3 million [cdc.gov] people die.
I have a simple challenge for you. Go try to find the median age of individual's who died from COVID in the US. You might find it's bizarrely hard to find, even though that is an extremely critical piece of information. Fortunately there is greater transparency in the UK and our numbers approximate theirs in this regard. The answer? 80.4 [ons.gov.uk] years old. In the United States our life expectancy (from pre-COVID times) is about 78.8 years. Obviously you don't drop dead if you're otherwise healthy after hitting 78.8 years, but 50% will have died by then, and your chances grow exponentially each year that follows. So, yes - they were "circling the drain" in general. My grandfather was one of them - 101 years old, Alzheimer's, and a man who had long since left this world, even though his body refused to go along for the longest time.
But to answer your question more directly we actually can use our numbers. [cdc.gov] The CDC does provide the death rate for the age group of 0-17 of whom your analog is appropriate for. And in a year of a plague with effectively 0 vaccines (for this age group), to say nothing of them being some of the most exposed to the virus? In this age group a total of 44,788 have died. And 300 of those deaths were attributed to COVID.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:23PM
Mandatory thoughts and prayers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Friday May 28 2021, @07:23PM
The thing is, we're all circling the drain. Some of us are a lot closer and circling faster than others, but in the long run no one here gets out alive.
Note that the mortality figures have trended younger over time. Perhaps the infirm were just the easy targets and got taken out early at a time when kids were learning at home and many parents were working from home and carefully following social isolation.
But mortality is only part of the question. The morbidity (in this case, lasting fatigue, brain fog, malaise) is also important and has affected younger people significantly.
Polio had a low mortality as well, the morbidity was the problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bethany.Saint on Friday May 28 2021, @08:06PM (1 child)
Median age doesn't mean much. Circling the drain is just plain wrong. How many years early did Covid kill is the question. Early in the epidemic here in the U.S. that figure was 9-1/2 years. For the people Covid killed it took almost 10 years off their expected lifetimes. I have no idea how this changed over time or what it is now but your looking at age alone is almost completely meaningless.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:39PM
The papers that have done this have engaged in a very disingenuous thing, whether intentionally or not. They look at the life expectancy at a given age, and simply apply that to deaths. So if somebody at e.g. 50 has a life expectancy of 40 more years and dies a death attributed to COVID then it's counted as 40 years of lost life.
It seems reasonable, but it's not because of extremely important nuance. COVID is relatively harmless for people without preexisting conditions. And these preexisting conditions are often severe - diabetes, cancer, heart disease, etc. And when somebody dies of cancer but has COVID, it is counted as a COVID death. This is not to inflate the numbers but because of the inverse of what I said. COVID is brutal on folks with major preexisting conditions and so even if the cancer is what "really" killed them, it's entirely possible that COVID may have accelerated the death.
Anyhow, the point of this is that you need to account for present health status when measuring years of life lost. A 50 year old with diabetes and terminal cancer who's death is marked as a COVID death, has a rather dramatically different life expectancy than a 50 year old in good health. Because of the nature of COVID (minimal effect on healthy, relatively severe effects on unhealthy) this is an extreme bias that renders these sort of studies on years of life lost not only meaningless but grossly misleading.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday May 28 2021, @04:11PM (16 children)
The MMR, DTaP, and Varicella vaccines have decades of safety and efficacy data. The COVID-19 vaccine is the first FDA approved and mass produced mRNA vaccine and the longest term safety data we have on it is from the Phase one trial participants in May 2020 twelve months ago. One of which is dead, but he was very old so that's not a huge shock or a factor to consider. [1]
That is a nontrivial difference. ... so, does that justify for me not getting vaccinated? No, not really. I'm in the 40-49 age cohort. Based on that data, my risk of dying from COVID-19 is 0.4%, roughly 1-in-200 chance. I feel, based on solely that and a year of safety data that I'm more likely to die from the disease than the vaccine. [2]
There is another consideration too. We don't talk about it much, but there is a nontrivial level of immunity if you've recovered from Covid-19.[3] Since I had COVID in January, the data says that provides a natural immunity that is of similar efficacy to having the vaccine. Spitball estimate, this moves my risk goes of dying from Covid from 1 in 200 to roughly 1 in 1,000. It's very hard for me to assert, on faith, that there isn't a 1-in-1,000 chance of severe long-term side effects from the Covid vaccine based on current data.
Sources:
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/william-shakespeare-first-man-in-world-to-get-approved-covid-vaccine-dies-at-81/ar-AAKn1H9?ocid=entnewsntp [msn.com]
The dude was 90 and his death was completely unrelated. It's not a data point worth consideration vis-a-vis safety to me.
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ [worldometers.info] COVID-19 Fatality Rate by AGE
Special thanks to the CDC for intentionally obfuscating this data here:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html [cdc.gov]
That's a dick move.
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00662-0/fulltext [thelancet.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:27PM (9 children)
Christ, hearing the cherries being picked under the guise of faux scientological rigor is honestly worse than listening to religious liberty arguments.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @06:45PM (5 children)
So even those who got COVID and recovered must take the vaccine? You don't even make sense; you are a vaccine fetishist because taking it is a sign of allegiance to your political tribe, not a matter of immunology.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @07:27PM (4 children)
Coming up with an inconsistent myriad of reasons to be anti-vax or anti-mask is about being part of a poltical tribe. WTF'ing over moronic self destructive behavior... isn't.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @08:24PM (3 children)
So you are going to demand proof-of-vaccination from everyone, forcing them to get a vaccine whether they need it or not. Sorry, but NO.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @08:35PM
For certain activities and hopefully for a limited time, yes. Or is the concept of a pandemic beyond your ability to understand? If the disease sticks around then expect it to become another vaccination requirement for public schools. Once enough people are vaccinated and the case load becomes insignificant I expect vaccination requirements will go back to pre-COVID levels.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @08:46PM (1 child)
You see... if you had been thinking about this undipshittedly you'd be making suggestions like: "What about getting waivers for the vaccine?" or asking questions like: "What can we do about these practical considerations that won't survive a one-size fits all solution?", and we'd be talking about how to minimize pandemic-related-causalities. But, no, we're gonna shake our heads cos we don't like who's coming up with the life-saving ideas.
Here's something for you to ponder: Every single news personality you're parroting your hard-nosed opinion from on has already been vaccinated. They have also not once mentioned vaccine requirements for attending public schools... which you've benefitted from.
Lots of 'adults' are going to be siting at the kids table this Thanksgiving.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @09:42PM
I try to keep those "adults" away from the children, thank you very much. I don't need another round of them being told the Muslims are going to bomb their school or the "socialist demonrats" are going to steal their teddy bears.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Friday May 28 2021, @10:44PM (2 children)
Please be specific about the cherries I picked. I cited more credible sources than you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @04:15AM (1 child)
Next time you should read them then. "The quality, quantity, and durability of protective immunity elicited by natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 are poor relative to the much higher levels of virus-neutralising antibodies and T cells induced by the vaccines currently being administered globally." And the conclusion sentence is "These data are all confirmation, if it were needed, that for SARS-CoV-2 the hope of protective immunity through natural infections might not be within our reach, and a global vaccination programme with high efficacy vaccines is the enduring solution."
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday May 30 2021, @03:14AM
I did read them, and I read the underlying reference as well. You're right, I did pick a cherry.
The authors assert that the level of immunity is correlated with circulating antibody levels, that those levels vary widely post infection, and that the levels decline as a function of time. Those are completely reasonable assertions.
The cherry I picked is in the prior paragraph:
If you go to the underlying citation on the efficacy testing of the vaccine candidate (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31604-4/fulltext) Figure 4 graphs A and B the circulating antibody levels for PCR confirmed COVID patients is higher than 14 days post one-shot and lower but not dramatically so after the booster. That leaves a quandary. Did that study (n=5) randomly pick people only with very high levels of antibodies?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Friday May 28 2021, @06:24PM (2 children)
mRNA has been studied for years. It's nothing new. What is new is using it to deliver a vaccine.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @06:31AM (1 child)
It is new in fact, everything we know is new. Humans have been plodding along for millennia, you're speaking on a mechanism underpinning biology that has only been around for 60 years. The world as we know it is about 100 years old. We don't know shit.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 01 2021, @02:52AM
Better not use Wi-Fi. Who knows what could happen, the technology is just too new.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sjames on Friday May 28 2021, @07:38PM (2 children)
You would have personally received vaccines with MUCH shorter safety records (the very same ones you mention). Plenty of people here on Soylent didn't get MMR because they started school before the combination was approved (but would have gotten measles and mumps vaccine separately). You probably got MMR only a year or two after it was approved.
Note that all of the vaccines you mentioned are intrinsically riskier than an mRNA vaccine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:43PM (1 child)
COVID vaccines have not yet even been officially approved. The emergency use authorization is a means of temporarily bypassing normal safety requirements.
So no, nobody would have ever been forced to get vaccines like this. The COVID vaccines are literally experimental.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday May 30 2021, @12:14AM
The difference between the emergency use authorization and full approval is a metric assload of paperwork and the final efficacy studies. They have made it through the safety studies and the mass distribution has borne that out.
Much of that metric assload of paperwork and some of the testing only became required after the typical childhood immunizations were approved.
So realistically, people my age and a little younger were required to be vaccinated with vaccines that were roughly as well tested as the COVID vaccine.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @03:41PM (8 children)
Tend to agree that big pharma can be corrupt, but they aren't making their money on vaccines, which are generally pretty low cost. Pharma makes their money on boner drugs, chemo and a number of other very expensive medications--that's where the corruption risk lies.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:16PM
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/06/from-pfizer-to-moderna-whos-making-billions-from-covid-vaccines [theguardian.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:28PM (1 child)
> boner drugs, chemo and a number of other very expensive medications
That sounds like the contents of Rush Limbaugh's suitcase on a trip to the Dominican Republic
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday May 28 2021, @05:41PM
Rush would also include opioid narcotics in his briefcase.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:31PM (4 children)
Moderna stock [yahoo.com] (MRNA - cute huh?) is up more than 900% since the plague began. Novvax [yahoo.com] is up a whopping 3700%.
Pfizer has stated they expect to sell a gross of $15 billion [qz.com] worth of COVID vaccines in 2021 with a profit margin of 25-30% (expected to increase over the coming years). That will make their COVID vaccine, alone, the second highest annual grossing drug - ever. For some contrast, Viagra (also made by Pfizer) generated about $0.5 billion in revenue in 2019. The reason their stock isn't seeing the same insane growth is largely because even though they're making money hand over fist with these vaccines, they were already a very large and profitable company whereas MRNA and NVAX show the profit effects of the virus more in a vacuum of companies that didn't have much else going for them.
But suffice to say vaccines are making a lot of people very very rich. The messaging about "oh they're not profiting off the vaccines" is being pushed primarily by corporate media, and it is a lie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @09:47PM
Have you seen their SEC and other regulator reports? Those numbers are child's play in comparison, as are the profit margins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday May 29 2021, @04:07AM (2 children)
Why expected to increase? It is today that the COVID-19 vaccine is in high demand, one year or so from now the demand will lower down to the volumes we are seeing now for flu vaccines.
Are you saying that shitloads of competition on a lower demand market will increase the profit margin?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @04:18AM
Don't you know how this works? You lose money on every sale, but make up for it in volume!</sarcasm>
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @01:52PM
They offered two reasons:
1) They can increase prices once we're out of pandemic status. They are accepting "only" a 25-30% profit margin while we remain in a pandemic status.
2) Increased efficiency and scale in production, transport, and so on.
Don't conflate profit margin (how many cents I earn per dollar of costs) with profit (total revenue - total costs). Profit margins can increase while profits decrease.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Tork on Friday May 28 2021, @04:37PM
It's contrarianism and you know it.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 30 2021, @10:56AM
Bovine excrement.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @02:50PM (2 children)
What you're doing is anti-intellectualism. Censure of thought and restrictions of liberty. But you're right, we should submit to science, which by its very nature makes far more errors than it does conclusions. We should submit to modernity which does little more than shape humanity into consumer cogs, into machines. We should supplicate ourselves to the religion of our government, the highest bastion of good thinking and virtue.
(Score: 4, Touché) by epitaxial on Friday May 28 2021, @03:24PM
Oh this is a good one. What genius free thinker you are. Smarter than the thousands of doctors and scientists who created this vaccine. I look forward to reading your published research on how they are all wrong. Nobody is censuring your thoughts, your smooth brain is doing a good enough job on it's own.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:32PM
Look out your window. See the open sewers? The dead lying in the gutter? Armed men watching over their property? Shit, you can't even see the civilization being supported by our collective decision to govern ourselves. Wooooh!!!! Gubmint off my medicare. Waaaaah!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @03:45PM (4 children)
So... asserting the right of human beings to refuse to be treated like cattle... bothers you.
Got it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @08:41PM (3 children)
Who is killing your family? Cannibals? Humanburgers??
Your hysterical hyperbole is what bothers us. No one is forcing you to get vaccinated, no one is forcing you to wear a mask in your own home or when you walk down the street.
You are free to reject vaccination, but don't whine when you're barred from certain activities or travel abroad. What's that? Consequences for your own choices? Womp womp
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @09:08PM (2 children)
And if you have your way, ignoring facts like herd immunity was achieved late last year (oh, God forbid you listen to any M.D. or scientist that doesn't get air time on CNN), we'll end up with a two-tiered society where some of us are more equal than others. How "Animal Farm" of you! So enlightened!
BTW, it shows that you're doing a really poor job of "Knowing your enemy".
How about you spend 15 minutes outside you echo chamber and see for yourself what "the other side" is saying.
The side that is not allowed on mainstream media?
I recommend the short video of Dr. Peter McCullough from Texas A&M. You can find it on Bitchute.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday May 29 2021, @04:20AM
Herd immunity would result in the number of infections going down. Because, see, it's sort of an immunity.
Let's give it a check [worldometers.info]. Whoops, the maximum number of new infections is around Jan 08 2021. And the going down after can be attributed to many other causes, mask and distancing included.
If you spouted the non-sense above based on that one, I recommend you take that recommendation and stick it up your ass - at least you may derive some pleasure in doing something with an otherwise worthless piece of stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 01 2021, @12:25AM
You need a better class of facts.
It's the typical structure of willing ignorant versus not. Your choice which tier you choose to belong to.
Your right to not be injected with stuff is matched by our right not be infected by preventable diseases. And there's more of us.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by STDOUBT on Saturday May 29 2021, @02:09AM (1 child)
Think you're smart huh?
You smarter than this guy?
https://rumble.com/vhp8e1-massive-world-renowned-doctor-blows-lid-off-of-covid-vaccine.html [rumble.com]
We must not say that every mistake is a foolish one.~Marcus Tullius Cicero
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 29 2021, @04:48AM
That is a new approach, instead of puffing up credentials just lying about them is so much better. And why not get your coronavirus advice from a cardiology specialist. I'll take my advice from the people listed at the place he works that are actually listed as experts in Coronavirus, a list that excludes him by the way. I'll also take the advice of the other, actually qualified experts in the area.
I also appreciate how the third suggested video on the list offered the opportunity to learn the "TRUTH" about the "Thousand Year Reich."