"Peter, I had COVID. So did my wife. We both felt bad for a couple of days, but we got over it. I didn't want the vaccine and now we don't need it. We have natural immunity now."
Conversation yesterday with my farm neighbor
Three months ago that neighbor pulled away from me when I mentioned I was vaccinated. "Vaccinated people have changed DNA. They shed a different biome. I keep my distance." He was laughing about it, but he wasn't really joking. He backed away and stayed at a distance.
He didn't get vaccinated, he took no precautions, he caught COVID, every member of his family got it from him, and now, three weeks after he first brought COVID home, he was telling me that everyone was OK. This isn't a unique story. It is a typical one.
My neighbor is perhaps 40-years old and his children are young and being home-schooled. The reality of COVID is that it is hit-and-miss, and that the chances of a very serious disease are low. Not zero, but low. My neighbor is in a position to tell other neighbors and friends that he had COVID and it was not that big a deal. That is what he told me: "I wasn't that sick."
The COVID-concerned population, which includes me, needs to integrate the reality of the typical outcome into our thinking. I am 71 and for people my age and older, COVID is dangerous. If unvaccinated, when we catch the disease some 1% to 5% of us will get seriously sick. That means the vast majority of us won't get terribly sick.
The local hospital publishes reports like the one below, making the point we all know, that most of the sick and dying are among the half of adults in this community who remain unvaccinated.
The COVID-concerned feel frustration and dismay. Can't they see not getting vaccinated is dangerous? Aren't they even a tiny bit concerned that they spread the disease to the rest of their community?
The fact that most people survive COVID is a headwind for widespread vaccination. Very few people read hospital web pages compared to the number of people who share experiences with friends. A neighbor who got COVID is a direct source. He is alive. The dead don't talk.
There are communities of confirmation by neighbors, friends, and local political leadership, saying COVID is no big deal, and that vaccinations are government overreach. Douglas County--a Trump-supporting timber area--has less than one seventh the population of Multnomah County, but has 59% of its COVID cases--five times the Multnomah rate. The same ratio is in effect in rural Baker and Harney Counties.I suspect that the die has been cast for America. COVID is endemic. The vaccinated will be mostly--but not entirely--protected against the worst of it. The unvaccinated are getting COVID and taking their chances. Some will die; many will clog up the hospitals. Most people will survive, and they will have some level of natural immunity. The number of vulnerable are shrinking. Hospitalizations already going down. COVID is running out of targets.
There it is. That is how it is working out in the USA. Unless there is a new variant, which could happen, COVID will fade away. A few extra tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of us will have died earlier than we would have, but eventually all of us die. America will survive.
Leadership matters. It shaped that original word-of-mouth. Leadership defined COVID as something to power through, masks as tyranny, and the vaccine when administered by Democrats, as suspicious and best avoided. It did not have to be this way.
17 comments:
The take-way from your antidotal conversation with your neighbor isn’t that Covid was a mild illness for them but that EVERYONE in his family became ill with Covid. The ease with which the delta variant spreads should be the warning and not the “look at me standing here talking to you” optic. Furthermore your neighbor failed to realize his role in spreading the disease. Additionally he treated you as a dangerous disease vector with your supposed altered DNA shows a complete lack of understanding about how the vaccine works. I am amazed at how deep the misinformation and outright lies have spread faster than the virus.
I have several friends who work as nurses in local hospitals and have been dealing with awful work conditions due to their hospitals being overrun with unvaccinated covid patients. It breaks my heart speaking to them about it, or when I see them (Frontline workers) literally begging people on Facebook and other social media to get vaccinated. They are at the end of their rope and frankly I can't blame.
This may be harsh and would probably never actually, but it is time that unvaccinated folks stop being accepted into hospitals. Make an announcement that gives people a warning and some time, something like "30 days from now, we will no longer accept unvaccinated covid patients."
These unvaccinated folks don't trust the doctors and scientists enough to actually get the vaccine, so Why in the world would they trust any treatment they'd get at a hospital? Time to make them actually put their money where their mouth is.
There was an article recently that American Airlines was going to be charging employees who weren't vaccinated an extra $200 per month on their health plan and that's another good idea. We have to find a way to reduce the strain that the unvaccinated are putting on the Healthcare system. It is not fair to the workers, and it's not fair to the rest of us. I work in construction, if God forbid I get seriously injured on the job and needed to go to the hospital am I going to receive lesser or no treatment because some idiot "did their own research" and didn't take the vaccine? That's just plain wrong at this point.
Yes, probably, sadly, true.
It's not that bad. So far. This time.
I think about luck; "I'd rather be lucky than smart". Like the luck of being born in America, the luck of well-off, good looking parents, the luck of robust DNA, and so on.
Professional gamblers don't count on luck. They know it's real, the odds sometimes tilt in their favor.
They also know it always runs out. Always.
We may have lucked out on this roll of the dice. Most of us.
Roll again?
Your neighbor is fortunate that he and his family have fared so well. 659,000 of his fellow Americans haven't.
Today, people are wistfully remembering how Americans came together on 9/11. Many ordinary citizens acted heroically. Today we're in the midst of a far worse disaster, but never have so many been so unwilling to do so little to alleviate it - like get a shot.
I think there is some question regarding immunity from having it. 1/3 lose their immunity after 6 months or so. Maybe you should stay away from your neighbor Peter as his dna has not been sufficiently altered.
Not so sure about COVID going away anytime soon. Football crowds, schools back, and general fatigue may just keep the virus going.
I am no alarmist, but I see here a tale of two species; human vs virus, enemies each trying to survive. A basic military strategy is to never underestimate your enemy. As you said, Covid seems to be running out of targets, but we would be foolish to think it has run out of mutations. We cannot breathe easy until or unless we have completely eradicated this virus from the Earth. That may take generations. The sooner we grasp that and attain the patience it entails, the sooner we will be at peace with each other.
I'd take getting Covid 10-times over before I got HIV (AIDS). HIV is a much bigger scourge on society, and I don't see liberals wetting their pants over HIV. Put your big-boy pants on. For the most part, Covid is only a danger to you if you're really old and frail. The sky isn't falling.
The White House confirmed Friday that President Joe Biden would continue allowing unvaccinated people to cross the border — even while demanding private employers to require vaccines for their workers.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki spoke about the hypocritical rules during an exchange in the daily briefing with Fox News reporter Peter Doocy.
“But it’s a requirement for people at a business with more than a hundred people, and it’s not a requirement for migrants at the southern border,” Doocy noted. “Why?”
“That’s correct,” Psaki replied, quickly moving to the next reporter in the briefing room.
Other White House reporters did not follow up and press Psaki on the administration’s hypocrisy.
Dave Norris—
Is your rather interesting human v. virus formulation made simpler or more complex if, as it increasingly appears, COVID-19 is a man-made virus irresponsibly manipulated in a Chinese virology lab with the financial connivance of Dr. Fauci and the NIH?
Mr. Dudgeon:
The two major theories for the origin of the coronavirus are natural transmission from animal to human or a lab leak. There isn’t enough evidence available at this time to confirm either, but most scientists consider the former more likely.
The notion that Dr. Fauci and the NIH were conspiring with the Chinese to unleash it on us is the wackjob theory. And what does the origin have to do with the need to get vaccinated?
Mike; Mr Dudgeon needs no evidence to support his assertion that the NIH, in cahhotsxwith Dr. Fauci, deliberately and with malice aforethought, created the COVID 19 Virus and unleashed it in the World. And, as you point out, even if they dis, it does not negate the need to get vaccinated.
Mike and edc—
The least you cats can do is read slowly and/or accurately. Plain errors and overheated or disingenuous straw men waste time.
First off, plain error. Today, most scientists do NOT consider the animal to human vector more likely. The lab hypothesis has growing momentum especially after various recent FOIA releases of Fauci emails, and no confirmed, discrete animal source of a SARS family virus has ever remained undiscovered for this long.
Second, I said nothing about “conspiring” to release, nor “malice” to “unleash”. The best lab hypothesis posits lab error, not mass murder, and the indictment on Doc Fauci is that he obfuscated (read: lied) self-servingly on both the feasibility of the lab theory AND, probably not unconnected, his own NIH funding (“financial connivance”, I said, as you’ll recall from your careful reading) of gain-of-function tinkering in Wuhan. My prediction is he will soon go the way of his COVID hero-to-disgrace paisano, Andrew Cuomo.
If you got your information from a credible source, such as the periodical “Science” instead of Fox Noise, you’d know your delusions about the origin are a crock, and it still has nothing to do with the need to get vaccinated:
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-say-unlikely-sars-cov-2-originated-lab-leak
I might pay serious attention to Low Dudgeon, if he were to cite legitimate sources for his contention, such as Science, or Lancet or nearly any reputable source. At this point, I've seen nothing but unverifiable gossip.
The sad take away from your encounter is that this brilliant and well informed “farmer” is home schooling his children. Mom and Dad are probably Christian wackouts who fear their children are going to be contaminated with evolution, masks, and the brown child in the desk next to them.
Was the tipoff the neighbors backing away, while claiming Peter's DNA had been modified by his Vaccination?
Sigh. I assumed most folks were familiar with the term "gain of function", as well as Dr. Fauci's rather legalistic parsing of the definition. No issue with the Science.com article, as it addresses another permutation of now-familiar red herrings. The primary claim is not and never was that the virus was "created" in the Wuhan lab out of whole cloth, but that it was converted from bats into a much more dangerous form via humanized mice and...gain of function "manipulation", a word I already used, above. "Unverifiable gossip" best describes the co-opted output of e.g. CNN, the WHO and the CCP, which on COVID have been making Fox look like serious investigative journalism. Which Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald actually are, for instance...
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