Thanks for posting here, and please don't get frustrated when guys have not "researched" this topic outside of memes or Facebook start commenting.No, I understand, I can see how I came off as a dick. I've just been irittated with a lot of peoples rationale lately. Its just a lot of people have serious mistrust over the goverment and the news and these companies which I totally understand. People can throw out numbers all day, if it is from any news agency I will immediately disregard it because they are not scientitst or doctors that understand the data and will post whatever. The numbers keep changing too as a lot of stuff has not been peer reviewed and is in "pre print" status. Basically that means "I did this experiment and collected data but no one else has looked at it to validate it yet". Unfortunately it is because this has happened so fast and most data sets are really small because there just hasn't been time. My issue was people saying I shouldn't take the 2 shot because it might be bad because a very small group of people have had adverse reactions. This is common but again people will look at a news article that might say 2 people had severe reactions but ignore the 10 million that did not. Yeah J&J is using a different approach but at the end of the day it is all about total efficacy and what is working the best. I have read so many NCBI, pubmed and other medical journals that is makes your brain swarm. The reality is get ANY vaccine you can, it is better than no vaccine when it comes to immunity but if you can get the ones that offer a second shot. The research I read actually says the ideal time between boosters is 12 weeks. At 12 weeks the efficacy is over 99% but that also means waiting almost 3 months to get a booster. With how things are people just need to be getting whatever is available to them and we cannot wait that long between shots. The bigger issue is that like influenza SARS-CoV-2 is capable of mutating rapidly which is why the Aztrazeneca vaccine is basically non effective against the South African variant and is no longer authorized for use in South Africa. Most people don't understand just how rapidly a virus mutates and this is the biggest issue. Pfizer has shown pretty good efficacy to the new variants because they created mRNA based on the spike protein that covers several epitopes of antigen from the variants that so far has created a immune response that can defend against these newer variants. I could talk about this stuff forever, but the reality is just getting people to trust medical professionals that they should get it. It is really unfortunate that it has been politicized. But I know for sure that if the mortality rate was 60-70% people would be fighting in line to get a vaccine. Which in theory it could, the new variants are starting to have higher mortality rates, South African and Brazilian variants. Anyway, I don't have the space or time to talk about everything, if anyone has specific questions they can PM me and I will try my best to explain.
Lastly with numbers stuff, numbers are going to be boosted by theses companies, they spent tons and tons of money and stand to loose billions if they can't send out their vaccines. So just take data with a grain of salt. If you see data from a company that isn't independent I would probably not pay a lot of attention to it.
Good luck to everyone, I did not even want to post on this thread but saw how many posts have been made and if people want things to go back to normal they need to stop using facebook and look at the science. I really wish this had not been politicized but it was and that's what makes this even more unfortunate because again it causes serious trust issues. Just my 2 cents
I was of the opinion that the light was at the end of the COVID tunnel, but am reading more and more that other countries and even some US states (MI) are starting to see alarming increase due to variants which are more transmissible, more deadly, and are affecting younger/healthier people than we have generally seen.