Jinnistan wrote:

Pfizer expects to roughly quadruple the price of its COVID-19 vaccine to between $110 to $130 per dose once the U.S. government’s purchasing program ends early next year.

Dear God, no...

AS someone who doesn't know jack about virology, exactly how essential is it that we continue taking these boosters.
Working in a hospital, it obviously makes sense for me to continue getting them as I am constantly exposed to COVID. But, overall in regards to society at large,  is there an increased threat in the severity of current of future virus' if too many people stop getting boosters? Does this increase the probability of it mutating because it gets passed around more?
Because basically, if I lived in the States, and that was the cost of a booster, there is a pretty close to zero chance I would get anymore unless it would lead to a collective disaster if we all stopped getting them.
 

crumbsroom wrote:

But, overall in regards to society at large,  is there an increased threat in the severity of current of future virus' if too many people stop getting boosters? Does this increase the probability of it mutating because it gets passed around more?
 

That kinda is how we got the variants. I think the problem is that this messaging gets lost between all the stupidity around resistance to vaccines and mandates, and the people with the facts get stuck playing defense.

crumbsroom wrote:

Rock wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

But, overall in regards to society at large,  is there an increased threat in the severity of current of future virus' if too many people stop getting boosters? Does this increase the probability of it mutating because it gets passed around more?
 

That kinda is how we got the variants. I think the problem is that this messaging gets lost between all the stupidity around resistance to vaccines and mandates, and the people with the facts get stuck playing defense.

Which is why it should be as painless for the average person to get these boosters. The notion that those in America (I'm assuming the cost will be covered in Canada) have to pay 100 plus dollars for what most will view as unneccessary (being that most recent variants are extremely mild for those without any pre-existing conditions) is a real gamble regarding of the future of this virus. Especially if it ups the rate of mutation, which should be in the fucking interest of the government to keep down considering the disastrous consequences if this gets out of control again.

The average working class person is already struggling. The notion that they might have to pay a couple of hundred extra dollars a year for shots that they probably don't understand the full value of is not going to end well.

 

I 100% agree. It’s dispiriting to see how little political will there is to take seemingly small steps towards a problem this serious.

JJ/Rampop, are flu shots free in the US? Or are they this expensive as well. We get them free here. I make sure to get one every year but a lot of people don’t (or didn’t pre-Covid at least).

Rock wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

Rock wrote:

That kinda is how we got the variants. I think the problem is that this messaging gets lost between all the stupidity around resistance to vaccines and mandates, and the people with the facts get stuck playing defense.

Which is why it should be as painless for the average person to get these boosters. The notion that those in America (I'm assuming the cost will be covered in Canada) have to pay 100 plus dollars for what most will view as unneccessary (being that most recent variants are extremely mild for those without any pre-existing conditions) is a real gamble regarding of the future of this virus. Especially if it ups the rate of mutation, which should be in the fucking interest of the government to keep down considering the disastrous consequences if this gets out of control again.

The average working class person is already struggling. The notion that they might have to pay a couple of hundred extra dollars a year for shots that they probably don't understand the full value of is not going to end well.

 

I 100% agree. It’s dispiriting to see how little political will there is to take seemingly small steps towards a problem this serious.

JJ/Rampop, are flu shots free in the US? Or are they this expensive as well. We get them free here. I make sure to get one every year but a lot of people don’t (or didn’t pre-Covid at least).

Flu shots are cheap; I think I paid $15 for my last one. Some people’s health insurance plans might cover it. Not all insurance plans are created equal, and can even vary from state–to–state. Volumes could be written about the clusterfuck that is the medical insurance industry in the U.S.

Likewise, that $110–$130 is what drug companies want to charge the health insurance companies. The high prices charged to insurance companies constitute a whole hot topic unto itself. 

But the questions remain:
How much will a person’s health insurance pay, and how much will a person be expected to pay out–of pocket? Again, that will depend on a person's insurance plan, and how greedy the bastards want to be.

What are the uninsured supposed to do? People are uninsured for all kinds of reasons. My insurance company dropped me under false pretenses just when I needed them most, and made me fight for five months to get it back. So I was uninsured for five months by no fault of my own. That was five months they should have had my back, when I needed to be recovering from severe and debilitating injuries. I didn’t even have a general provider, for five full months (our insurance companies dictate who our doctors will be, contrary to what we were promised). I had to become my own lawyer and fight them tooth–and–nail, and when I was in no condition to do so. For any health care I did manage to find on my own, I had to pay out–of pocket, and some of the care I should have gotten in those first crucial weeks I just never got. I wanted to sue my medical insurance — the evidence is clear as day — but couldn’t find a lawyer willing to take them on, and eventually the statute of limitations ran out. Welcome to fucking America.

And here’s another question: 
Since the vaccines were created using American’s tax dollars, how the fuck does it make sense that we should now have to buy the thing we already paid for, especially at such exorbitant prices? 

The debate over health care in the U.S. goes back what, 100 years? At least 80 years, I think. Political and economic ideologies, and massive amounts of cash, have kept us on this nauseating rollercoaster for decades. 

.

Last edited by Rampop II (10/24/2022 7:01 pm)

I think this belongs here rather than the conspiracy thread.

The latest update on the Covid origins was provided through an amusing mishap - a House Republican subcommittee's poor understanding of how PDFs retain information.  Thanks to the inadvertent method of dissemination, we can look at some of these revealing documents before these Republicans can edit or spin them for their own prefered purposes.  However, some of the documents - which include an number of insider emails and Slack-chats between some of the primary scientists and researchers involved in the earliest assessments of the Covid origins - are advantagous to some Republican claims.  The basic bombshell is that it appears that these scientists felt that the possibility of an accidental lab leak were much more likely than they publicly stated, and that they purposely decided to suppress this theory for political reasons.  This can be summed up in one particular quote from Andrew Rambaut (from a Feb. 2, 2020 Slack, not in the above article but can be found in the linked documentcloud files): "Given the shit that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes".

The "specific engineering" is a key distinction.  Note that the resulting paper, "Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" rejects the lab leak theory with the conclusion: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."  The assumption is that anything that could have escaped from the Wuhan lab must have been constructed or engineered, and we've seen similar language used and conflated to dismiss the lab leak theory - "man-made", "manufactured", etc.  To remind you of my original post on the matter, and the 2017 paper that described the WIV's efforts at collecting, storing and initial study of bat coronoviruses, the latter claims: "cell entry studies demonstrated that three newly identified SARSr-CoVs with different S protein sequences are all able to use human ACE2 as the receptor".  In other words, the S ("spike") protein in three of these collected natural samples were already capable of direct human infection without the necessity for further modification, mutation or engineering.  The lab leak theory could be true regardless of lack of evidence of genetic "purposeful manipulation" if someone had been exposed to one of these naturally-obtained specimens.

Of course, the scientists conversing in the above emails and chats were certainly aware of this, noting the impossibility of discerning a lab sample of a naturally-evolved virus from a "wild" naturally-evolved virus, and the conclusion was simple: it's just way too much trouble to get involved with, so let's be safe and go with the least-provocative theory.

This isn't any kind of definitive proof that there was an accidental lab leak, only proof that the idea of one is not as implausible as it was initially made out to be, and it doesn't have to be nearly as malicious as some (Tom Cotton, Rand Paul, RFK Jr) have portrayed it as being.
 

Just what the goddam mother fuck.
Reuters investigation:
"Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic"
Well, there goes another acre of that so–called "moral high ground." I really hope this results in convictions.

Sorry I can't insert links right now but here's the URL:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

But in 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

Well that's good to know.  "Secret orders" and obscure amendments in behemoth spending bills.

The senior defense official said the Pentagon has rescinded parts of Esper’s 2019 order that allowed military commanders to bypass the approval of U.S. ambassadors when waging psychological operations. The rules now mandate that military commanders work closely with U.S. diplomats in the country where they seek to have an impact. The policy also restricts psychological operations aimed at “broad population messaging,” such as those used to promote vaccine hesitancy during COVID.

I'm not sure that I'm relieved about "parts" of some secret order being rescinded.

It probably isn't realistic to expect some kind of blanket prohibition on these kinds of influence operations.  Unless we get serious about passing some real anti-disinformation standards with teeth, and without carve-outs to allow our disinformation, we're unfortunately at the mercy of the tech platforms to police this kind of "inauthentic behavior".