Corona Virus

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Gusto10
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Re: Corona Virus

Post by Gusto10 »

Jim wrote: Thu Oct 07, 2021 9:04 pm
Gusto10 wrote: Thu Oct 07, 2021 8:26 pm Why may I not be respected for my choice being the antural route for immunisation?
I can't find the definition for the word "antural". Is this a typo? If not, please let me know what it means.
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Gusto10
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Re: Corona Virus

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Gusto10 wrote: Fri Oct 08, 2021 5:38 pm
Jim wrote: Thu Oct 07, 2021 9:04 pm
Gusto10 wrote: Thu Oct 07, 2021 8:26 pm Why may I not be respected for my choice being the antural route for immunisation?
I can't find the definition for the word "antural". Is this a typo? If not, please let me know what it means.
Natural.
I'll be travelling during the weekend. So I'll not bother others with "my quest". I do hope that it will give the chance to all who contributed to polarisation of the thread to find the 50 shades of grey between the black and white and where FUD will not be used unmotivated and as a replacement of a 4 letter word.
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Re: Corona Virus

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Gusto10 wrote: Fri Oct 08, 2021 6:51 pmI do hope that it will give the chance to all who contributed to polarisation of the thread to find the 50 shades of grey between the black and white and where FUD will not be used unmotivated and as a replacement of a 4 letter word.
There may be "50 shades of grey" in many things, but in instances like this there are more like five. Too, "FUD" is an acronym standing for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" which is a long recognised tactic for gaining control over others, not a substitute for what's colloquially known as the "F-word" which is what you allege.

Face it, the science and the numbers are in. We have valuable tools that we should be using, and the more people that are afraid makes that more difficult.

As a data point, I was "late" in getting the vaccine; I wanted more data to be available, and I wanted it from multiple countries -- mainly because I didn't particularly trust the US CDC because it was politically tainted. So I read medical journals instead of watching YouTube videos. Once the facts were satisfactory, I moved on the matter. The delay had nothing to do with fear, uncertainty, or doubt but rather the damage that the political regime in power at the time had done to the credibility of organisations that should be above politics. Even to this day, the symptoms listed by the US CDC are so close to those of the common cold as to be useless as diagnostic tools.

One of the important parts of this thread before it veered off into conspiracy-theory and FUD-mongering were the descriptions of what individuals who very likely had contracted the disease felt and wrote about. Those are valuable data. Wild conjecture about "lab escapes" and conspiracy were -- and are -- not.
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Sinned
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Re: Corona Virus

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Symptoms, ah, yes. We have "the cold", we have "the flu" and we have "coronavirus". All with very similar symptoms. I don't usually get colds for some reason or if I have they have been so mild that they have not inconvenienced me. I have had flu multiple time and each case has been a very torrid affair that I never want to repeat. Two weeks of sheer, abject, painful, bed-bound misery. I may have had coronavirus in December 2019 as I had symptoms and lost my senses of smell and taste for a while. But then maybe not. So now if I get any of the symptoms the first thing I will do is take a corona test. And I will for the second time in several years have a flu jab. The thought of getting flu now scares me as it is so similar to covid. Looking back my bouts of flu were perhaps more serious and I was maybe in more danger than I thought. But I had it in mind that it was just "the flu" and it wouldn't kill me. Now I'm not so sure. Food for thought for me.
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Re: Corona Virus

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Maybe I'm just fortunate, but the last time I had genuine flu was at Christmas 1967, when due to the Foot & Mouth disease Irish people living in the UK weren't being allowed home for Christmas, so I spent it at an uncle's house in Gravelly Hill, Brum. (Watched the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper show!!)

Nothing since then and I've been rung up by my GP's office offering me the flu jab this year . I'm dithering, but a patient advised me to have it.

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Sinned
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Re: Corona Virus

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Tom, I consulted a GP in Belgium [0] and she advised that if one was to get corona along with the flu ( which is possible due to lowered immune system ) then it would most likely kill. I have always held off on flu jabs as previously when I had one I came down with flu-like symptoms. So last year for the first time in many years I had a flu jab and was symptom-free. So I will continue with flu jabs and only re-think the decision if I have an adverse reaction to one. You're not getting any younger Tom, so maybe time to have the flu jab. That you don't appear susceptible is to your advantage but why take chances, especially now?

[0] She came to us as an English language student for 3 years when she was 14 and we have kept in touch ever since, through her medical training. Occasional visits to each other's countries. She's as much like family to us as our own. But somehow, don't know why, but I trust her judgement more than my own GP. In fact I see her more often than I see my own GP. So I have followed my gut instinct and her advice.
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Re: Corona Virus

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Sound advice, Dennis. I'll give my GP a bell.

Tom
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Gusto10
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Re: Corona Virus

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crfriend wrote: Fri Oct 08, 2021 10:20 pm
Gusto10 wrote: Fri Oct 08, 2021 6:51 pmI do hope that it will give the chance to all who contributed to polarisation of the thread to find the 50 shades of grey between the black and white and where FUD will not be used unmotivated and as a replacement of a 4 letter word.
There may be "50 shades of grey" in many things, but in instances like this there are more like five. Too, "FUD" is an acronym standing for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt" which is a long recognised tactic for gaining control over others, not a substitute for what's colloquially known as the "F-word" which is what you allege.

Face it, the science and the numbers are in. We have valuable tools that we should be using, and the more people that are afraid makes that more difficult.

As a data point, I was "late" in getting the vaccine; I wanted more data to be available, and I wanted it from multiple countries -- mainly because I didn't particularly trust the US CDC because it was politically tainted. So I read medical journals instead of watching YouTube videos. Once the facts were satisfactory, I moved on the matter. The delay had nothing to do with fear, uncertainty, or doubt but rather the damage that the political regime in power at the time had done to the credibility of organisations that should be above politics. Even to this day, the symptoms listed by the US CDC are so close to those of the common cold as to be useless as diagnostic tools.

One of the important parts of this thread before it veered off into conspiracy-theory and FUD-mongering were the descriptions of what individuals who very likely had contracted the disease felt and wrote about. Those are valuable data. Wild conjecture about "lab escapes" and conspiracy were -- and are -- not.
In respect of the hesitance on the vaccine, we are in essence in agreement, only I'm still priudent even more now Denmark and Sweden issued a (temporary) non use of Moderna for people under 30.
As to stating that covid is a lab virus, I have to the best of my knowledge indicated, or at least tried to indicate in such a fashion that everybody could decide form himslef oin the value, that the number of reports indicating that it might very well be a lab virus is increasing, e.g. the report in the Atom Engineers periodical, described by the Guardian as a periodical of great easteem and the interview with Luc Montagnier, nobel laureate on HIV, on Cnews . To the best of my knowledge I didn't turn a hypothesis into a fact.
A number of reports have indicated that Covid MIGHT VERY WELL be a lab virus, same as SARS1, MERS, Ebola, HIV, etc. I hope that this mis understanding (due to quick reading maybe?) has now been clarified. In addition thereto I do find the statements by a number of scientists in respect of the other virusses most interesting.
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Re: Corona Virus

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Gusto10 wrote: Sat Oct 09, 2021 12:46 pmA number of reports have indicated that Covid MIGHT VERY WELL be a lab virus, same as SARS1, MERS, Ebola, HIV, etc. I hope that this mis understanding (due to quick reading maybe?) has now been clarified. In addition thereto I do find the statements by a number of scientists in respect of the other virusses most interesting.
And it also highly probably has its origins in the wild. There is also precisely zero proof of Ebola and HIV being laboratory products and never has been. -- plenty of wild speculation, especially in the case of HIV, but zero credible proof.

The problem here is that if it is a "lab escape" the thing lacks the markers that indicate human tampering, so if it was in a lab it got there from the wild and would have eventually jumped the species barrier anyway. Furthermore, in the case of the other earlier "examples" the genetic technology did not exist at the time so can only be a wild fantasy of overactive imaginations.

On the vaccine front, one type may exhibit problems in some individuals or others; this is normal and to be expected. That's why the guidance on the matter. Overall, the deployment of the vaccines is effective insofar as it reduces mortality and hospitalisations at extremely low risk to the population.
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Sinned
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Re: Corona Virus

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Oh, come on gusto, the Grauniad ( yes the spelling is correct ) can never be called "....a periodical of great esteem....". It's a matter of spotting the mispronts on any page. It has been rumoured, but never proved, that they now do it deliberately so that its older readers don't suffer withdrawal symptoms and still have that nostalgic feeling and satisfaction of spotting the mospront. They'd be outraged if there wasn't one. It's a rag, plain and simple, just like all the other (news) papers. Even The Times doesn't have the status it once had. As for the Atom Engineers periodical, is that local to you because a search fails to turn anything up. Is this another case of misdirection and do we have to check everything you post now? In which case we are wasting valuable time where we could be doing something useful, like watching paint dry.
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Re: Corona Virus

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Sinned wrote: Sat Oct 09, 2021 7:39 pm Oh, come on gusto, the Grauniad ( yes the spelling is correct ) can never be called "....a periodical of great esteem....". It's a matter of spotting the mispronts on any page.
I carry no torch for t'Grauniad and I don't often read it, but I believe you're quite wrong to say that it is not a periodical of great esteem. It is a serious newspaper. For a start, it does some great investigative journalism: the so-called Pandora Papers leak is just one of the big stories it has been involved with over the years.

And your gag about mispronts is, alas, way past its sell-by date: it harks back to the days of hot-metal typesetting when that paper was still entitled the Manchester Guardian and was obliged to rush its first editions off to the train so that they could compete on the newsstands with the London-based national papers. Having said that, I still call it the Grauniad myself ;-)

BTW, my wife and I had our third Pfizer shots (starboard side) and 'flu (port) on Wednesday. No ill effects so far.
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Re: Corona Virus

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Tom, on the comment about getting corona with the flu I came across this article on msn.com:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/g ... li=BBoPWjQ.

I never thought about multi-strains of flu. Interesting to note that there are 4 strains in this year's jab.
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Re: Corona Virus

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Sinned wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 7:31 pmI never thought about multi-strains of flu. Interesting to note that there are 4 strains in this year's jab.
This is one of the problems with influenza and which causes much confusion about what's going on. There are likely well over a dozen strains of it, each of which is genetically different enough that one vaccine cannot target all at once. The decisions as to which strains to vaccinate against varies from year to year and are based on educated guesses as to which ones will be dominant in the coming season (it takes time to ramp up production of the vaccines). This makes it a bit of a crap-shoot whether any given year's formulation is going to use is entirely successful or not.

Fortunately, coronaviruses are much simpler -- in genetic terms -- than influenza thus explaining the rather astonishing efficacy of the newly-engineered SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. The genetic complexity of the various influenza strains makes that sort of tightly-targetted tactic impossible (or at least highly difficult), and that's likely led to a lot of confusion amongst the lay population who don't understand how viruses work. That simplicity also accounts for why we're seeing new variants (mutations) of SARS-CoV-2 so often compared to new strains to influenza -- the complexity of the influenza virus means that mutations are more likely to be negative-impacting than positive, and that lack of complexity gives SARS-CoV-2 the upper hand as "there's less to go wrong".
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Re: Corona Virus

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You can always ignore his babbling and not give a damn on his false information.
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Re: Corona Virus

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crfriend wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 10:02 pm This is one of the problems with influenza and which causes much confusion about what's going on. There are likely well over a dozen strains of it, each of which is genetically different enough that one vaccine cannot target all at once.
It was explained to me as follows. In the tree of life the viruses and bacteria are branches far away from humans and other larger animals. Viruses mutate during reproduction and that's how they evolve. Because larger animals reproduce much more slowly they invented a different way to increase genetic variation: sex. As a rule viruses and bacteria don't have sex, larger animals do.

Except influenza. Get infected with two strains of influenza and you'll create new kinds of influenza. And it doesn't need to be in humans, any host will do. So now you have a super-advanced genetic variation mechanism (sex) paired with super-high speed reproduction rates and you get something almost invulnerable to modern science.
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