Should We Go, or Should We Stay?

[Rob]

As we discussed, it should be apparent if Omicron is on the island. Today's numbers seem to confirm that it is.

Since Christmas Day, the daily case percentages have all been over the prior below 10% levels. The numbers for yesterday show a new increase to 32.5% testing positive with 365 new cases.

Interestingly, the hospitalizations are exactly where they were on Christmas Day at 97. With over 1100 new cases detected since Christmas, the number of hospitalizations have remained the same. This would follow the Omicron tendencies.

For those curious, out of the 365 cases reported yesterday only 2 came from Westmoreland, the parish where Negril is located. The Resilient Corridor seems to be doing its job as 293 cases came from the Kingston/St. Andrew area, not a part of the Corridor.

Those numbers make sense as virtually everywhere you visit
in Negril is outdoors while most everything in Kingston is indoors and air conditioned.

As for a little observational on the ground reporting, around two weeks ago a "cold" swept through Negril causing Panadol Multi Symptom and vitamin C and zinc to fly out of the pharmacies. No one thought to be tested as the symptoms were cold like and passed quickly.

Being out yesterday no one is complaining of the "cold", which is a good sign.

With the timing, it could very well be that Omicron has come and gone through Negril, which along with our high vaccination rate because of the Resilient Corridor protocols could leave the community with the "super immunity" which is one of Omicron's silver linings.

With nearly everyone having the same symptoms at the same time may be more than a coincidence.

Vitamin D also plays an important part of our immune system especially against Covid and Omicron. And since the sun manufacturers vitamin D in our bodies, being in the Jamaican sun every time you go anywhere should be a positive in minimizing Omicron.

[ChipS]

"Since even Pfizer is now recommending 4 shots (money grab?)"

just a reminder that big mean greedy horrible evil pharma is the only reason we can travel AT ALL. last year at this time, we were desperate for a life-saving vaccine, and now that we have a few of them we can resume spending our time and energy bashing the drug companies, instead of worrying about being put on a ventilator or dying. Also, I see on social media that many are relying on the 'blood of Jesus' to protect them from the virus. I haven't seen the clinical trial data on that, but it doesn't appear to be any more effective than 'supplements' or ivermectin. However, if you're more concerned about pharma profits than you are about the pandemic and it's economic, and social costs, you do have other alternatives.

[Rob]

ChipS,

I am fully vaccinated. I am 61 with underlying conditions. When the vaccines came out, everyone was told that things were going to go back to normal. No masks, restaurants and bars open and international travel resumed. That has not been the case. Travel to South Africa was recently banned.

A vaccine, by definition, is to provide immunity against one or several diseases. None of the vaccines did this, but acted as a therapeutic to alleviate the symptoms. The concept of a "vaccine" was oversold. They are therapeutics at best.

If Pfizer admits three jabs will not stop Omicron, logically, why would a fourth? Where is the scientific data?

The "vaccine" therapeutics are an amazing advancement for future treatments, but when was any long term, or even short term studies done on receiving a fourth jab? Point me to that research otherwise I will follow actual science and call Pfizer for doing nothing more than a money grab.

From very simple logic, if three jabs gives you zero prevention against Omicron according to Pfizer, then adding a fourth with no long or short term studies done would be a best guess, at best.

The original tests were done based on two jabs with no long term studies. They are now wanting to double the amount of therapeutics entering your body, with absolutely no studies possible at all since the scientific community didn't take the South African results as serious until very recently.

Thank Jah I never wasted my time on "social media" reading about the blood of anyone. Friggin FB....

Stay safe man! Everyone stay safe.

[rocknrollfarmer]

Here's sumting I've been thinking about for a while.....while we are all in Negril during our times, why don't we all just Frolic more in the ocean? I looked up frolic in the dictionary. "To play merry pranks. Joyous merry-making! Frisky! ". First off, it would be a good social-distancing practice. BIG ocean! Great exercise {good for us...right?} FUN! Smiles! Happy! ....Just my 2 cents worth, 18 below zero. Staying home. Hope you all in Negril right now are having a great New Year's Eve! *Disclaimer...while frolicking in the ocean, don't step on a black sea urchin.

[ChipS]

I'm still happy to have this 'therapeutic' vs nothing that we had a couple of years ago. You can downplay the efficacy of the vaccine...uh, er... sorry - using WHO and CDC terminology here ... I mean 'therapeutic' since it doesn't prevent every single infection; however, if you look at graphs showing the numbers hospitalized in the ICU and dying, the numbers are CLEARLY in favor of the 'therapeutics'. At my local hospital (Duke), 100% of the patients hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated.

I agree that we should follow the science and if the science doesn't point to the need for a 4th booster, then they shouldn't push it. I don't know where things stand with Pfizer, however, Moderna has shown that a 3rd shot provides additional protection against omicron compared to only 2 shots (again, not 100% so I guess that would be considered by some to be a failed 'vaccine'), so at least for Moderna, additional shots do seem to provide additional therapeutic benefit. Boosters are nothing new, and additional shots DO provide an additional immune response, which might be helpful in reducing severity. We'll see what the studies show.

Thanks to these 'therapeutics' we're in a better place than where we were this time last year, and for that, I remain grateful.

[Rob]

As am I grateful, as I said, I am fully vaxed. An interesting study that if you are not already aware of is that a booster of the J&J (based on the most recent data we have from the origin of Omicron in South Africa) is more effective than a booster of Pfizer against Omicron. T-cell counts drastically improve.

Pfizer suggesting a 4th jab seems to have no scientific basis whatsoever. The only real data we have is from South Africa. For Pfizer to suggest a 4th jab without having data to prove its benefit, while it might work, it will most certainly put more money in their pockets. Governments, as in we, the people, are paying for the free jabs.

Obviously some of the resistance to the "vaccines" come from the fact that there have been so many public "breakthrough" cases (more than one would believe from an actual "vaccine"), and with Omicron even triple vaxxed are testing positive although having milder symptoms. So as a vaccine, they are not doing what a vaccine is supposed to do.

Had the global public been told from the outset that the jab was not a vaccine but something to lessen the symptoms, hospitalizations and dying and that Covid would be with us until global herd immunity was reached from actually becoming infected, I think more people would have understood just how important the jabs would be in saving their lives and ending the pandemic and taken the shot(s).

But as I have said, it wasn't sold to the public as a therapeutic but as a vaccine cure so we could all go about our previously normal lives. People are not stupid, but when they are lied to by those in authority that should know better, they end up not trusting what they are hearing even from the experts.

This practically goes back to the boy who cried wolf fable, when you are lied to enough, you don't even believe it when it is true.

[wrtiii]

Rob, I don't mean to start a fight about this, but you're mistaken about vaccines in general and the COVID-19 ones in particular. Before vaccines are approved, the clinical studies assess the effectiveness (aka efficacy) as well as the safety; few if any vaccines are 100% effective. Smallpox vaccine, the gold standard for vaccine effectiveness, is 95%; measles is 93% for one dose and 97% for two. Vaccines work in two ways, the prophylactic effect (preventing disease symptoms by stimulating the immune system's production of antibodies), and the therapeutic effect (reducing disease symptoms by preparing the immune system to produce T cells rapidly upon infection). During the clinical trials, the effectiveness of the various COVID-19 contenders was widely reported, and you can look that up. One dose of J&J was more effective than one dose of Moderna or Pfizer, which is why the standard for the latter two was set at two doses to start with. Also, most vaccines (and the body's own immune responses) are not forever, partly because of our own immune systems and partly because antigens vary and evolve. For example, once you've had chickenpox, you are nominally immune to it, but the chickenpox virus remains in your system and can express itself later in life as shingles, which is why the older population is encouraged to get a shingles vaccine to bump up the immune response to it for 4 years.

[Rob]

A discussion doesn't have to end up being a fight but it often is a good way to learn.

I don't think I am mistaken, but I do know that the definition of a vaccine has been changing since Covid started.

Older definitions stated things like, "a substance used to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against one or several diseases" or "any preparation used as a preventive inoculation to confer immunity against a specific disease".

This is what the word vaccine means to most of the people in the world. The current definition, updated by the CDC on September 1, 2021 and the WHO on August 30, 2021 changed the word immunity to protection. Here is the search source so anyone can check it:

https://www.bing.com/search?q=defini...T003&scope=web

The current Covid vaccines are still listed as approved on an emergency basis and have been since December 2020. They have not been through the rigorous, lengthy clinical trials that all the other vaccines you mentioned were made to go through. They are still on "Emergency Use Authorization" by the "Thorough Evaluation of Available Safety, Effectiveness, and Manufacturing Quality Information by FDA Career Scientists, Input from Independent Experts". This is not how the other vaccines you mentioned were granted approval.

I am far from an anti-vaxxer, I am fully vaccinated. But the truth is that the promise of the Covid vaccines were over sold. From the Washington Post article November 2020:

"A vaccine won't be available immediately for everybody," says Arthur Reingold, a professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He also chairs California's COVID-19 Scientific Safety Review Workgroup, which will evaluate the safety and efficacy of covid-19 vaccines.

“It probably will take four to six months,” he says. “What that says to me is that people will have to keep wearing masks at least until spring. We won’t be in a magically different situation by February or March. I don’t see how that can possibly happen.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/healt...bc9_story.html

This is what the world was being told by the same scientific community that approved the Covid vaccines for emergency use.

Add this to the common belief that vaccines offer immunity and it is not hard to tell why people question the vaccines and the experts that promote them.

And smallpox has been completely eliminated by the vaccine. 100%

From the BBC:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources...3-a4568e161c4f

Amazing results like this also led people to the false belief that the Covid vaccines would prevent Covid.

[wrtiii]

Good discussion.

My point is that no vaccine gives 100% immunity. The elimination of smallpox was made possible by the development of a vaccine that was 90% effective, in combination with developed long-term immunity by those who survived it. Note that "immunity" doesn't mean there's an invisible force field keeping a virus away from you, but that when a virus gets into you, the multiple layers of your immune system are able to deal with it without you getting sick, or very sick.

Smallpox was eliminated because (1) the virus - antigen - that causes it is a relatively easy one that doesn't mutate very rapidly and once your immune system recognizes it, the response is long-lasting; (2) a vaccine was developed that would alert the immune system against the antigen in 90% of the vaccinated population; and (3) a global effort was made in the late 1960's (nominally begun in 1959 but dramatically ramped up in 1967) to not only vaccinate everyone but to aggressively contact trace and isolate infected and exposed individuals in every country worldwide. This effort took about 10 years.

I think people used to understand this, and accept it. When I was a kid, the health services would formally quarantine families where there was a case of mumps. This meant that they put up "QUARANTINE" signs on your house, and the family was really locked down - no trips to the grocery store, no "essential worker" exceptions, etc. In combination with the MMR vaccines which confer about 85% protection, mumps has now become fairly rare, at least among the vaccinated.

The word "antibody" has been in use since before we knew what the things we now call "antibodies" are. The immune system has multiple layers, and the definition of "antibody" has narrowed from "something in the blood stream that attacks the antigen" to a rather precise chemical definition, and the existence and role of T cells, which attack infected cells rather than the antigen, has become more understood. A lot of this came in the 1990's as part of HIV/AIDS research. That's a large part of the reason the definitions had to change: it turns out that people with long-term immunity to a disease might have low antibodies against the disease, but heightened T cell response, or there's more going on with our immune systems than we understand at present (definitely true!).

At present, we in the US lack the public spirit and will to really isolate infected people; AIDS was a large part of the reason for that, as isolating was the same as "coming out" and we as a society shifted to thinking that telling people you had a transmissible disease was optional on your part.

One thing that has changed dramatically is that as far as I can tell, the "medical community" you cite really doesn't exist, because in the Internet era, politics completely dominate. By this I don't mean Democrat/Republican or Conservative/Liberal, but "if I agree with someone, I can rebroadcast his information or disinformation to everyone and Facebook will help me do it if I express outrage". "Dr, Oz says...". You yourself shared a BBC link that was written "By the Visual Journalism Team" and includes no references; while I am not saying anything in that article is wrong, generalizations such as these are designed to attract clicks, to have attractive visuals, and to be easy to read, but it is very difficult to fact check them. There have been a huge number of supposedly authoritative postings by "X who is a real doctor" during the past two years that are intended to play into the current tribal political situation rather than actually convey information. The CDC itself became much more political, and while I continue to think that the bulk of the researchers who work there are dedicated scientists, their number and funding were reduced and the actions and public statements by those at the top have been dubious at best. Redfield's term as the CDC Director certainly was a failure. But I'm not sure anyone could succeed in an environment where anyone claiming that bleach, or ivermectin, or zinc, or nasal douches, or vitamin C, or, or, or... gets an immediate large viewing audience.

[ChipS]

"I think masks are just plain dumb and avoid them at all costs."

I respectfully disagree. I agree that they're probably don't do much good outdoors (except maybe in a large packed crowd outside), but I do think they can work inside. It's true that the virus particles are smaller than the openings in the mask, so a mask won't prevent individual airborne particles from getting through, but they do prevent - or greatly diminish - small particles of saliva that we all expel when talking. From my limited understanding, the dose of virus is important, so a single airborne virus probably isn't sufficient to infect someone. However, those spit particles can be full of virus, so that's where I think masks can help prevent transmission - especially from the person wearing the mask.

Here's the first paragraph of the conclusion from a peer-reviewed article titled 'An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19' (Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America):

"Our review of the literature offers evidence in favor of widespread mask use as source control to reduce community transmission: Nonmedical masks use materials that obstruct particles of the necessary size; people are most infectious in the initial period postinfection, where it is common to have few or no symptoms (45, 46, 141); nonmedical masks have been effective in reducing transmission of respiratory viruses; and places and time periods where mask usage is required or widespread have shown substantially lower community transmission."