How long do you think it should have taken them?


I have not seen anything about "[anyone with] some form of allergies", but rather a more precise condition. (Though I don't doubt there are media companies inflating/misrepresenting the issue for their own benefit.)

Of course taking medicines should be done in conjunction with knowledge of medical history, and the benefit of multiple different vaccines is to help cover situations like this.

Here is the official statement/advice: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/confirmation-of-guidance-to-vaccination-centres-on-managing-allergic-reactions-following-covid-19-vaccination-with-the-pfizer-biontech-vaccine

It sounds to me that they were aware of the possibility, were monitoring for it, and were able to respond appropriately.



That's not an unreasonable viewpoint, but how much is "enough" proof?

The more people who can safely be vaccinated who do so, the safer it becomes for those unable to be vaccinated.

Perspective?

Have not stood in line with a bunch of syringes injecting what ever in me since the military.

Did not cost me a cent. If I get inoculated. It better be for free.

In the UK, the MHRA approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and it was in fact the first country to do so.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/u...vid-19-vaccine

"The decision to approve the supply of this vaccine was taken under Regulation 174 of the Human Medicine Regulations 2012, which enables rapid temporary regulatory approvals to address significant public health issues such as a pandemic."

rapid, temporary, regulatory ...

In the EU, including Germany where the vaccine was jointly developed, it has not yet been approved.

I'm surprised no-one has yet mentioned the very serious concerns that were raised by Dr. Michael Yeadon and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg regarding the Pfizer vaccine.

They have pointed out that there's a risk that the Pfizer vaccine may cause an immune response to a particular protein, syncytin-1, which plays a key role in the formation of the placenta during pregnancy. If that turns out to be the case, women with this reaction may find themselves permanently unable to carry a child to term.

Note that the doctors did not say that this would definitely be the case, but pointed out that since the vaccine has not been tested on pregnant women, we do not know if there is a serious problem here or not.

More alarmingly, if you Google keywords that are relevant to this issue, you'll get tons and tons of articles "debunking" it, and they all have one thing in common: They're not debunking anything. And when the media walks in total lockstep with no facts on their side, I tend to get suspicious.

Examples:

• "A false post on social media claims COVID-19 vaccine causes infertility in women" (USA Today)
  
  True, the post contains an image from a news publication that uses the word "sterility", while the correct term is "infertility." Semantics FTW.
  
  
• "No, Pfizer’s head of research didn’t say the COVID-19 vaccine will make women infertile" (Politifact)
  
  Yes, Dr. Yeadon isn't the "head of research" at Pfizer, but he WAS their Chief Scientific Officer of Allergy and Respiratory Research nine years ago. That's obviously totally different, so I guess we can safely disregard everything he says, even though his actual credentials are impeccable.
  
  Also, Politifact points out that both Snopes and The Associated Press (powerhouses of immunological research, I'm sure) has also "debunked" this, so there.
  
  
• "Fact Check: COVID-19 vaccine not shown to cause female sterilisation, Pfizer and experts clarify" (Firstpost)
  
  Again, someone on Facebook (neither Dr. Yeadon nor Dr. Wodard) used the word "sterilization", but that means the inability to conceive. Inability to complete a pregnancy would be infertility. Also, there's the "head of research" thing. So a random Joe was wrong (or at least he was being inaccurate) on Facebook, so we should clearly ignore the whole thing.
  
  
• "No, there isn’t evidence that Pfizer’s vaccine causes infertility" (The Baltimore Sun)
  
  And that is absolutely 100% correct! Because no-one has checked. And as long as it stays that way, there'll continue to be no evidence.

Pfizer is a large pharmaceutical company with a long and sordid history of gross malfeasance. Now they've been indemnified by the government for any and all negative side-effects from this particular vaccine, while still keeping all the profits, so they have absolutely no incentive to do anything but the bare minimum of trials.

I think some skepticism is warranted.

Pregnant women are excluded from most clinical trials and there are actually very few medicines that are approved during pregnancy.

The Poltifact report also indicated that if syncytin-1 was a factor that current pregnant women who catch COVID-19 would also become infertile which has not been observed.

In the UK, pregnant women are currently excluded from the vaccination program. So is anyone who has such severe allergies that they have to carry an epipen around with them.

When I read the first reports from China back in early January, I was seriously alarmed. I called a number of acquaintances and family members and told them to prepare for something that could potentially be huge.

And when the virus really hit Italy around March/April, it seemed like my worst fears had come true: Local hospitals were overburdened, and we saw videos of exhausted doctors and nurses crying in the hallways. We got to read horrific stories of ventilators being rationed, and doctors having to decide who was to receive treatment and who was to receive palliative care in the form of... Tylenol and Ibuprofane.

Fortunately, that particular region of Italy turned out not to be at all representative of the world population at large. Italy has long had an aging population, with 23% recorded as being over 65 in 2019. 85% of those who died from complications related to SARS-COV-2 were over 70, and back in April it was clear that 1/3 of all deaths occurred in the 83+ age group (source).

As the pandemic has kept spreading, the mortality rate has kept going down towards that of, yes, influenza. Early numbers were wildly inaccurate because we didn't know that a significant number of those infected are completely asymptomatic. That's very good news!

Data from the Census Bureau show that the number of people who have died in 2020 in the U.S. is in fact no higher than it was in the same period in 2019 and 2018. That may sound completely absurd given the daily reports of deaths and the extreme measures that have been taken, but it is nevertheless true.

Students and researchers at Johns Hopkins (the same university that keeps track of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.) realized this when they looked at the data, and published a report in "the Johns-Hopkins newsletter". Unfortunately, the report was removed from their web site (and retracted by the Newsletter), but here is a copy. (Note: It was not retracted because there's anything wrong with the data or the conclusions. In fact, no reason was given. My guess is it disrupted the narrative.)

Thousands upon thousands have died, many more have recovered but are suffering significant aftereffects, a significant number have acquired autoimmune diseases post-infection (Type 1 Diabetes being a classic example), and potentially millions have been unable to work for a longer or shorter period. And vulnerable people have been put at risk.

By the flu. Every year.

But we don't usually talk about that, and the death certificates say "pneumonia", "heart failure", "renal failure", or even "natural causes" for the elderly and infirm, not "influenza." But deaths where SARS-COV-2 is involved gets reported differently, because the disease has a very specific name: COVID-19.

For a period, there was significant overreporting based solely on SARS-COV-2 tests with little regard for other factors. That has since been somewhat corrected, and as a result the numbers are now lower but the old data is of course still unreliable. That leaves the total deaths reported as the only really reliable indicator, and the numbers clearly show no increase in the U.S. compared to previous years.

So don't put the vulnerable at risk, wash your hands, stay at home if you get symptoms, and by all means get tested. But there's really no reason to panic, according to the actual, hard data.

I don't where they got that from. It makes very little sense in this context.

The issue is that the spike protein targeted by the vaccine shares a (very) short sequence of amino acids with syncytin-1. But targeting that protein is what the Pfizer vaccine does; there's no reason to suspect that the body's own immune system would also end up targeting the exact same protein after an infection. That's just a straw man that Dervila Keane, a Pfizer spokeswoman, put forth in an interview and then summarily beat into the ground.

In this "debunking" article from The Journal (in Ireland) she's quoted as saying just that, but the article also quotes Dasantila Golemi-Kotra, an associate professor in microbiology at York University, as saying that she estimates the risk of an autoimmune reaction to be "very small." As in, not zero.

I'm not saying I'm convinced this is going to be a problem. I'm saying I'm concerned by the almost complete lack of factual and unbiased reporting, which means we will end up making decisions that are not based on facts.

The risk of a meteorite falling on your head is also very small but not zero. Is that a good reason for not going out of doors?

Nope. But if the risk of choking on a penny that you put in your mouth is also very small, it might be a good idea not to do that.

It all depends on the circumstances. What is "very small" in this context?

The idea is to mass-vaccinate an entire population, which for the U.S. alone means some 325 million people. Let's say 1 in 10,000 qualifies as "very small", which is definitely does when we're talking about side-effects of medication in general. That would mean 32,500 cases, of which a little over half would be female, of which about half would be either fertile women or pre-pubescent girls.

So in that scenario we might end up with 8,000+ infertile women.

All I'm saying is: Wouldn't it make sense to investigate this further before rushing out a vaccine? Surely, we could vaccinate all men and all post-menopausal women and develop a test for an immune reaction to this protein? Given that men and the elderly are most at risk anyway, wouldn't that be pretty much an ideal solution?

And as for being hit by a meteorite: Unless one is in the 65+ age group, the survival rate for COVID-19 is better than 99.9%. I guess that meteorite thing might be even more unlikely to happen, but for some reason people are indeed being told to stay at home to avoid this very marginal risk.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GOq8-FR8s1E
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mOmtZ_p6alU
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_jwBxZMWrng
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eZvsqBCvB00
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lANVlSvXrYk

Cutting past all the waffle, this seems to be your key argument:
But you've not provided a source to back-up that statement, and it doesn't match the numbers I found.

New York Times have data comparing different countries - they are saying 329,300+ excess deaths from March 1 to Nov. 7 for the US, with more to come.

But hey, it probably wont even reach 0.2% of the population - what's a few hundred thousand people dying when they would have lived? Who needs parents and grandparents anyway?

Yes, I have. The Johns Hopkins report is a very easy read, and it even links to the source data so you can check it for yourself. Edit: The links don't work in the PDF; I'll see if I can find an archive of the actual web site.
Well, everybody loses their grandparents. Everybody.

The Johns Hopkins researchers concluded that the vast, vast majority of those who die from COVID-19-related complications would have died during the year anyway. Their words, not mine.

And it's the only way the numbers make sense: If SARS-COV-2 is mostly lethal to the same group that typically die from the flu, the totals will stay the same. Because you can only die once.

BTW, did you read that article carefully? (It's behind a paywall, but for those interested, here's an archive link:
https://archive.vn/6aWld)

This is what the NYT journalist(s) did:

1. First, they found some projected numbers for deaths in 2020 for various countries
   
   
2. They then found the actual reported numbers
   
   
3. They found that in many cases, the projections came up low
   
   
4. They also found that reported COVID-19 deaths did NOT match up with the "excess" they meant they had identified by comparing reported deaths to projections; the number of COVID-19 deaths were actually much lower
   
   
5. They then conclude that surely, ALL deaths above projections MUST be due to COVID-19, so that means there's a huge, hidden number of COVID-19 deaths!

That is the most moronic analysis I've read in quite a while, not at least because everyone (as in, all doctors, health professionals and statisticians working with these numbers) agree that the number of COVID-19 deaths have been consistently overreported, not underreported.

And you can't just point to a discrepancy between projections and reports after the fact, and conclude that you've found something. That's not how anything works.

The article does contain nice graphs that show that the "excess" deaths absolutely do not correspond with the arrival of COVID-19 in several of the countries (no, NYT, not all countries were hit by COVID-19 in Q1 2020).

But the article also says this: "In a handful of countries there has been no clear sign of increased mortality this year." That sort of undermines the conclusion, but don't worry, because "the reasons for this are varied and will become clearer in the months ahead as countries process and certify deaths." Right.

I think it makes more sense to stick with the numbers from The Census Bureau and The Bureau of National Statistics.

I did hear that the Biontech vaccine should not be taken by pregnant women, a few days ago on mainstream news. Possibly the other one also.

BTW, I watched a 14 (!) year old South park episode yesterday about 9/11 conspiracy myths. It boiled down to "at a minumum a quarter of all Americans are retards"(*) and that the conspiracy myth that the governemnt staged 9/11 was staged by the government. (This was South Parks golden phase IMO.)
Just shows that people were no different then than they are now.

(*) From my side, no offense against Americans or mentally disabled people. They could just as well have said "a quarter of the world's population are idiots"