ALL CAPS MODE DONT KARE HOO'S AGGREEING

So we know for a fact that you can get any of the 3 vaccines and still catch COVID. In every post on here or other social media posts I've read, those with the vax make the assumption that it was unvax'd people who spread it to the vax'd people. But if you can CATCH it in spite of being vax'd, doesn't it follow that you can SPREAD it in spite of being vax'd?? In short, whether your vax'd or not, you have no way to know from whom you caught it. All this divisiveness is nuts and doesn't help anything.

I just talked to one of my in-laws who said that 9 of her extended family have tested positive and ALL were vax'd. I'm not one of those to say that this means getting the vax doesn't matter - all measures say it seems to dramatically reduce your chance of catching it. But I do NOT think it's fair or accurate to assume that a vax'd individual who tests positive must have caught it from an unvax'd individual. If there's some science behind that, I'm open. But I don't think there's any way to know for sure the source of any positive test.

Tiggity®

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Couple of things......

Sep 13, 2021, 12:50 PM

The ONLY benefit (today) of a vaccine is it keeps you out of the hospital and keeps you from dying. Pretty big benefit, but then again that's about it. Vaccinated, unvaccinated, your first 6 days of CLINICAL infection (before symptoms), the virus will have its way, replicate uncontrolled, and spread. AFTER 6 days, you either fight it off by creating antibodies (unvaccinated), or using immunity, either vaccine antibodies or from a prior infection. But unvaxxed can pass it to unvaxxed. Vaxxed can pass it to vaxxed. And vaxxed and unvaxxed people can pass it among themselves. ONLY question is if prior immunity (recovered cases) still pass it the same way or as easily.

The vaccine mandates are not to stop infections, not to stop cases, and not to create herd immunity. They are to lower the hospital and death burden and allow this to become closer to influenza, and make it something we can "live" with. IF we get 80% of people vaccinated, we can forget about "cases", they're going to happen forever. We can only pay attention to hospitalizations and deaths, and those will be at much lower rates.

Cases were important before vaccines, and are still important to monitor, but they're less important than hospitalizations and deaths. And the more vaccines we get into arms, the less cases matter.

Influenza suppresses interferons as well, and the same reason flu is still around is the same reason covid will always be around. BUT, covid suppresses your immune system FAR more than influenza (or any other known virus), and for FAR longer, making viral loads that much higher, and making it spread that much easier. Interferons were suppressed for only 2 days with original covid from Wuhan, and as such, you only had two days to reach your peak viral load before your immune system kicked in (and you got symptoms). With Delta, that's now 5-6 days. More suppression, more replication, higher viral load, higher shedding, more transmission. Delta wasn't some amazing spike protein mutation that accomplished a doubling of the reproductive rate or a massive spike in viral load, it was a mutation in another part of the covid genome that governs immune suppression. It's why the vaccines went from working very well, to working less. In a lab, in a controlled environment, our vaccine antibodies still neutralize covid very well, at rates over 90%. Plenty enough to "work". But in real life, your antibodies have trouble handling 250-1,000 times MORE virus. Hence the breakthrough infections (with symptoms), and hence the higher hospitalization rates for delta, unvaxxed, which offsets the benefit of the 40% who are vaccinated and then some.

If you don't get a vaccine, you will get covid, and eventually again and again. If you get a vaccine, you will still get covid, but that first infection will be much easier to survive. And then you will get covid again. And again. Maybe another vaccine, and then covid again and again. Over time severity drops, hospitalizations drop, and cases will not matter as the rates of death and hospitalization will drop to influenza levels or maybe even less. This ends up as a flu or bad cold, someday. And that day will come quicker with vaccines, or drag out longer without them, with more deaths. The UK has higher rates of covid cases per capita than the US, but their hospitalization and death rates are far lower, because they have maybe 15% more people vaccinated. Really it's that fine of a line. If we can get half of the people unvaccinated now to get one, we can just tell everyone to ignore it. You'll still get it, and may get sick, but odds are much higher you don't take up a hospital bed or worse. Hence the mandates.

But no one explains this to people. We are managed not informed. We can get there with probably 2 million deaths if there were no vaccines and we carried about as normal, or we could get there with perhaps 800,000 deaths if say 80% of people took vaccines.

Personally, since June or maybe early July, I've made no assumptions about vaccines having anything to do with cases. Only deaths and hospitalizations. People who think the vaccines impact transmission are just wrong (since Delta....since May), but they've never been informed either. The science (love that term), shows vaccines only help you fight off the infection. You will still get an infection, whether you know it or not.

The science I'd like to see is random screenings of recovered cases in places where delta is rampant. Are THEY spreading it just like vaccinated and unvaccinated people? It COULD be that natural infections give the added benefit of being exposed to the ORF genome segments where immune suppression occurs. So an antibody to a natural infection MAY look for things other than the spike protein our vaccine antibodies look for. The other things that make our bodies not see the spike protein or covid for 5-6 days. This could go either way really, and anything would be a guess, but it's not a guess to see it needs to be studied. We know reinfections are at FAR lower rates, maybe 3% or less. So do those reinfections, especially the 97% who don't get symptoms or know it, still get infected, carrying highs viral loads, and spreading it at the same rate as others, and perhaps just are very good at riding the virus with better antibodies later, or do they have antibodies that can attack earlier?

And also know immune suppression does not equal vaccine escape. Vaccine escape can be seen in a lab setting, simply pitting vaccine antibodies against covid. Again, you could put natural antibodies from a recovered covid case in a lab dish with delta covid and you could also study that as well. Or even knowingly expose a recovered natural delta covid person to a room full of delta carriers and see what happens. Then the next question is after a vaccine, and then recovering from a breakthrough infection, do you have the same added immunity as a naturally recovered case who had no vaccine.

So much stuff NOT done. You have to look to see where it is done, but I know this all is probably being, or has been done already.