Discussed: Covid spreading, vaccine, mandates, ivermectin
The pandemic is still dominant throughout the country. We take a look at the spread, the vaccine and Biden's soft mandate, as well as the pros and cons of ivermectin
The Spread
Covid is peaking once again. We are in the middle of the fourth wave, with the average daily death total from the last week being 2011, at the time of writing. The United States is, once again, experiencing over 2000 deaths a day.
When this happened under President Donald Trump, it was beyond clear to the vast majority of people both in America and globally that he had failed on covid. He was viewed as a failure. Covid is probably the main reason that he lost last year, because God knows that Joe Biden didn’t have a whole lot else going for him.
For the first few months of the Biden Presidency, things seemed to be going well. In mid-July, the 7-day average daily death toll reached the incredible low of 188, which isn’t even 10% of what it is now.
The Vaccine
This seems like a good time to talk about the vaccine itself.
Get it if you can. I understand that, for many people, this isn’t possible, either because your GP advised against it for health reasons, or because you simply can’t get out of work, but if you can get it, you should.
The evidence is that this virus works. For example, Pennsylvania recently announced the breakdown of all their cases, hospitalizations and deaths from covid-19 in 2021, and they found that 94% of cases were of the unvaccinated, as were 95% of the hospitalizations and 97% of the deaths.
This is proof in itself that the vaccine works. Anyone claiming it doesn’t it bullshitting you.
There are three other reasons given that people don’t want to get the vaccine: side-effects, the virus won’t affect me anyway, and benefits to big pharma.
Let’s start with this first reason. There is no doubting that there are some side effects to the vaccine. When I got my first shot last month, I had a sore arm for about a week, with that kind of complaint being the most common. That isn’t that serious, and certainly isn’t as serious as dying of the disease itself.
More serious potential side effects include myocarditis, which is the swelling of the middle layer of the heart, which can lead to heart failure. There have been 854 confirmed cases of this after the vaccine in the United States, and another 600 or so reported ones. These cases are mainly male adolescents and young adults. This is a serious disease with a death rate of at least 25%. However, there have been way more lives saved, 139,000 according to an August study, than have been lost to myocarditis, and the risk of getting this disease is incredibly low.
There has also been 46 confirmed cases of thrombocytopenia syndrome, or the rare blood clots that we hear a lot about, after receiving the Johnson&Johnson vaccine, most of which were in women under 50. Again, the risk of getting this is incredibly low, as there have been 14.5 million doses of this vaccine, of which just 46 have resulted in this side-effect.
The point isn’t that there is zero chance of you getting these potential problems. The point is that the chance is so miniscule, and the chance of you dying of covid is significantly bigger, so it is worth this tiny, tiny risk.
The second reason that people give is that covid won’t affect them anyway, so why should they bother getting it?
There are two main responses to this.
The first is that no-one knows how covid will go for them, and they could well end up in hospital. There have been about 5 conservative radio hosts who have said that they don’t trust the vaccine, haven’t got it, and then ended up dying of covid, many of whom saying on their deathbeds that they regret not getting the shots. These are people who thought that if they got it they would just get a headache for a day or two, and then be fine again. Don’t take that chance.
The second is that, even if you got covid and had no real symptoms from it, you could pass it on to someone else, whereas if you vaccinate against covid, you don’t run that risk of passing it on.
The final reason that some people, particularly Left-wingers, give is that they don’t want Big Pharma to benefit out of this.
I completely agree. Big Pharma is what is wrong with this vaccine. The fact that they are making money out of it shows that they are genuinely evil individuals who don’t care about the wellbeing of people but rather the amount of money in their bank accounts.
However, just because the people in charge are bad doesn’t mean that the products they create are also bad. Just because they are awful people doesn’t mean that the products they unfortunately have power over aren’t completely necessary.
Overall, get the vaccine. Please.
Vaccine program until this month
As this happened, the vaccination program was progressing quickly. They were getting about a million shots in arms each day, about 60% of which were first doses. That’s him doing a good job in getting the vaccine out there. Now, 61.5% of Americans have been vaccinated, which is a decent proportion of the population.
That number is OK. It’s nothing extraordinary, but it is good compared to the rest of the world.
Credit for this reasonable work goes to a number of people. Firstly, the Trump administration. They set aside billions of dollars towards Operation Warp Speed, which is the reason that we have so many different vaccines.
Then, some credit goes to Joe Biden and his administration for getting the vaccine out to so many people. I believe in giving credit where it’s due, so I will give an administration that I despise a level of credit for this.
However, both of these President’s have made serious blunders concerning the vaccine.
To start with President Trump, he had the power to stop the big pharma companies (Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna etc) from patenting these vaccines. What these corporations patenting the viruses does is it stops other countries manufacturing the virus generically. This means that large proportions of the developing world, especially across the Pacific and Africa, haven’t been vaccinated to any degree of note.
Compare that to when the Polio vaccine was invented by Dr. Jonas Salk, and, when asked if he wanted to patent his vaccine, he responded “could you patent the sun?” His refusal to patent it meant that it could be created cheaply in factories all over the world, which has been done safely for many decades now.
Bill Gates spent the first part of this year fighting desperately to stop the waiving of patent rights. As Wired put it, “Gates pushed for a plan that would permit companies to hold exclusive rights to lifesaving medicines, no matter how much they benefited from public funding.” That means that these companies have gained billions of dollars off of this vaccine, which has stopped people in poorer nations from being able to get it given that their governments couldn’t afford it. It is also worth mentioning that Bill Gates, who has a monopoly on global health, has shares in Pfizer, meaning that he has personally benefited from the vaccine being patented.
President Trump could’ve stopped this from happening. Long ago he could’ve, like any other US President, nationalized big Pharma, meaning that companies like Pfizer and AstraZeneca no longer exist, meaning that they can’t patent anything, and everyone can access the vaccine and all future medicines created by the US. Of course, this could’ve been done at any time over the last 170 years or so, which means that blame for that can’t be put purely on President Trump, obviously, but he is a part of the problem.
President Biden has also made mistakes. What he could’ve done is mandated that every employer give their employees 2-3 days off to get the vaccine and deal with any potential side effects. The fact that people couldn’t get out of their job to get the shots is one of the main reasons that many poor, working-class people haven’t been vaccinated. Joe Biden could mandate that these people time off to get the vaccines, but he refuses to do so.
Mandates
This is a particularly contentious issue. Just over a week ago, President Biden announced that every federal employee, every employee of a company with over 100 staff and all hospital/health workers either get the vaccine or get tested once a week.
If this was a flat mandate where he said that every applicable person had to get the vaccine, I would vehemently oppose this. I think that everyone, no matter how wrong they are, should have the opportunity to deny the vaccine, because that’s freedom.
I would also suggest mandating that people have the opportunity to get off work without sacrificing pay and potentially losing that job before going all the way to this mandate, so that the only people impacted are genuine anti-vaxxers rather than those who simply haven’t had a chance.
You also need robust mechanisms to make sure that no one is punished for not getting the vaccine if they can’t, due to other health reasons, having been advised by their GP, and that’s not something I’m sure that we can trust the Biden administration to have.
The other thing I’d do is make home testing kits extremely accessible, that meaning free, so that people aren’t spending large periods of time waiting in line, which will harm their day-to-day life, doing which shouldn’t be the role of the government, even if that person’s opinions are just plain wrong.
However, if all that other stuff had been done first, sure, I support this. I think that we should be actively encouraging people to get vaccinated, so that life can get back to normal ASAP.
As it is, I’m sort of on the fence. I feel like we are punishing a lot of good people who simply haven’t been able to get out of work to get the vaccine for their working conditions rather than anything else. However, I do generally support being able to trace and prevent covid as much as possible, with the vaccine being our most effective tool to do so.
Ivermectin
The other main debate going on at the moment concerns ivermectin. There are a great many people, some of whom are medical professionals who have done considerable research on this topic, who believe that this drug can prevent an individual from getting covid-19. There are others who don’t, some of them also being medical professionals who have done studies on this.
Let’s dispel with one fiction to start off with: the idea that this is purely just some horse dewormer. It is true that there is a version of it that is designed for horses and other livestock. However, there is also a human version, and that is the one we are focusing on. Anyone talking about how this is a horse medicine is either incredibly ignorant or being disingenuous.
The people who do this are mostly liberal politicians and Democratic politicians, who are seemingly desperate to ‘own the Republicans,’ who by and large support ivermectin as a treatment.
There is also one possible other reason that the CDC and the FDA generally don’t support ivermectin: they receive money from Pfizer and other Big Pharma corporations, and they can’t sell Ivermectin for much money at all. I’m not saying that this is in any way shape or form that this is necessarily accurate, but it is possible.
Getting to some of the studies either way.
One study from the American Journal of Therapeutics (A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines) concluded that “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”
That suggests that ivermectin works, quite clearly.
However, there are some studies to the contrary. For example, one study, from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, found that ivermectin is “not a viable option to fight covid.”
What this all says to me is that we don’t know. Ivermectin might work, it might not. But any non-scientist claiming that it definitely does or doesn’t work is being a bullshitter, at least until we get more data.
Also, don’t take the horse version, whatever you do. The human one is the one that we aren’t sure about. We know that the horse one isn’t safe.