I refuse to believe anyone more than 5 years apart from me in age is real here
I read something like 11 doses have been delivered but only 2 million have been administered. For example some states have barely administered over 15% of the vaccines delivered. I honestly think vaccinating everyone without the groups would be so much more efficient. It would also help pull the fence sitters to go through with it as well.
Man I feel this. First person in the UK to get the vaccine was 92 years old.
And the vaccine needs 2 doses 28 days apart.
And it's the middle of a very cold winter.
92 years old.
Waste of everyone's time much?
I don't think they deserve to die either. Obviously UK and the US is different to Australia, but here it is almost exclusively old people dying in aged care and it would make sense as a priority here.
Children get it last though right? In my country they're not even planning to vaccinate under 18s as of now. I'm glad I'll at least get the vaccine because I'm just about adult. It is shit though, I work in fast food
Or you could just make friends with folks near the border and see if they can ship you some you salty dog
The trick is to throw it back in their face. Or if you don't mind going low, call them a lib.
I thought "fuck the old and clinically vulnerable, they're going to die soon anyway" was an openly fascist argument being astroturfed to reduce the impact of COVID on business, but apparently it's also mainstream here on chapo.chat. Cool.
I'm sure you're not a fascist, but the argument you're adopting is a fascist one. Obviously I agree with you that you should have better protection at work, that your company should force customers to wear masks, properly enforce social distancing, and so on. If your business is non-essential they should close and you should get paid to stay at home (like the furlough scheme we've had here in the UK). If it's something essential like groceries then you should be protected as much as possible at work and you should be higher priority for a vaccine than anyone healthy in your age group that is in a non-essential job and getting paid to stay at home, or who's able to work from home. It's fucking monstrous that none of that's happening and you should feel every bit as pissed off as you do at the capitalist and ruling class for treating you like this.
None of that makes it any more right for you to make the leap to saying fuck the old and the sick, let them die. You know as well as I do that the vast majority of deaths and serious cases are the old and those with comorbidities, many of whom have been as careful as they could in their cirumstances. Part of the reason you're in such danger is that the exact same argument has been deployed against exactly the protections that you're rightly upset about not having! It's an evil, fascistic argument that's unworthy of you as a leftist.
I realise you've already sort of acknowledged that (if I'm understanding right), in which case, good, we agree, and I'm just reminding you that if you know your emotional reflex is towards a wrong, harmful, evil position then you should fight it as much as you can, not indulge it. Plus you have dozens of upvotes, and Randomdog's post that vaccinating a 92 year old is a "waste of everybody's time" is upvoted too, so even if you don't need to hear this, apparently some people do.
"A couple more years"? The *oldest * boomers are 74. That's even younger than that ghoul Ezekiel Emanuel's cutoff for when we should stop caring about human life.
Yes they have fewer years left than you but the risk of death from COVID increases with age fast enough that old people will on average lose more years of life if they catch it than young people, as I'm sure you know.
But long term disability from COVID in the young is extremely rare. Even when you account for that and the difference in life expectancy you're at less risk than an old person. More old people have died or become seriously ill from COVID than young people, so this difference in risk of infection isn't enough to change the priorities.
As I said to the other guy, if the science says that vaccinating people who are unavoidably exposed to other people will save more lives or more years of life than vaccinating the vulnerable, then I'm all for it. I don't think the science does say that which is why they're not doing it, but if you have some evidence I'm happy to change my mind on it. But that's not what I had a problem with
I agree that studies aren't the be all and end all, if common sense is clearly on one side of the argument. I'm just not sure it is in this case. See my response to the other guy on nursing homes.
Out of interest, why do you think it's being rolled out the way it is if it's so obviously going to lead to more deaths than doing it your way?
Actually fuck off. Old people can't catch covid if the people they interact with don't have it
So to protect one old person you either vaccinate that one person or everyone they interact with? Which do you think you'll be able to do sooner?
EDIT: If there's some actual evidence to show that vaccinating people who are forced to have contact with other people most will save more lives than vaccinating the most vulnerable, then I'd support it. But note that this isn't actually what the OP was arguing:
I can’t stop thinking about how I might be potentially crippled for 50 fucking years (lol if I live that much longer) just so some geriatric can get another 2-3.
My grandmother died from covid, and my grandfather caught it and is suffering the effects. Tell me, if you wanted to save them, would you try to vaccinate every single old person in Canada? Or would you vaccinate every single person who works in a nursing home? Which is to say, are there more old people in existence? Or people who work in nursing homes?
Friendly reminder: there aren't enough vaccines to inoculate every single old person in Canada, but there is enough for all the people working in nursing homes - keep that in mind when you answer
Nursing home workers are frontline medical staff which everyone here agrees should be vaccinated first. We are talking about grocery store workers, which there is of course an argument for being prioritized, but it is a different argument to the one you are having
Sorry to hear about your grandparents.
My point is that we need to target the vectors of infection, rather than the people we're trying to protect. It seems counterintuitive, but it actually is easier to vaccinate everyone old people come into contact with than it is to vaccinate everyone who is old or otherwise susceptible to the virus, because there are a few critical points where the virus can actually spread to them, and people staying at home are the least likely to be a vector
I don't know the math on that personally, it could be so. You'd have to factor in the number of frontline retail workers, probably the largest block of workers there is right? And then some calculation of individual risk of negative effects, cause one healthy =/= one risky. More math that I could do but presumably some epidemiologist has done that calculation and its somewhat informing policy
I'm very sorry to hear about your grandparents, I hope your grandfather has a swift recovery. My grandmother is in a nursing home so I very much hope that they get it right here.
To answer your question... I don't know. I don't have enough information. I think when you say "old people" you mean "nursing home patients", right? Otherwise the comparison wouldn't really make sense. The problem with vaccinating the staff first is that just one covid case gets into the home and now most likely all the extremely vulnerable patients have it. That could be from a staff member for whom the vaccine wasn't effective, or an electrician or paramedic or I don't know what. Does that outweigh the fact that there's more patients than staff members? Maybe? I guess the scientists think it does or we wouldn't be doing it this way.
But again this isn't my point (and in fact I'm going to stop engaging on this argument after this comment because it's not one I have a stake in). The OP was talking about a trade-off between him catching COVID and an old person catching it, not saying that vaccinating him would be a best of both worlds solution for both him and the old person
I ultimately don't really care why the OP wants it before others, I believe that the best way to protect everyone (old folk included) is to cut the pandemic at its most potent vectors - in other words people that are forced to come into contact with many other people. If the virus is able to reach the vulnerable, we have already failed. You're right in that some other outsider might bring in Covid to the nursing home, which is why I don't think that people should be visiting nursing homes during this time, unless it is absolutely critical (like life or death level emergency)
My bro had it six months ago and still can't taste. Dude can eat an onion whole now. Fucking imagine never being able to taste again (his might, idk)
I don't disbelieve you and that sounds awful and life-changing, but there is a difference between "this awful thing could happen to you" and "this awful thing will happen to you", but the brain cannot easily see that difference so stories like this tend to make people feel a lot worse than they have to. The truth is your bro is uniquely and tragically unluckly, but any given young person has a very low probability of experiencing serious adverse effects compared to someone in a risk-group.
It may seem like a callous thing to say, and I wouldn't post it anywhere else because I wouldn't want to feed virus skepticism by echoing the "its just a flu" people, but that isn't a problem here so I can be honest and I honestly think it is more callous to say "I can't believe old people get the vaccine first", sorry. If you are young you kinda have to just suck it up because this virus isn't really dangerous to healthy young people anywhere near what it is for unhealthy or older people and that is just a fact, your bro's unfortunate circumstances aside.
I’d rather not add permanent lung scarring, kidney or other organ damage, neurological issues like the brain fog which seems to be a common complaint, etc.
I don't think there is really a significant chance of these things if you are quite young, just going off the stats I've seen. I think brain fog is an easily misattributed symptom. Obviously nobody wants to get sick but herd immunity will come from a combination of vaccination and infection, better those likely to suffer adverse affects get vaccinated first
Look, I am sympathetic to your work having become extra shit and you feeling like your safety has been overlooked, it definitely has. But pretending like this is the black plague creates its own problems: for one, people who expect them can create symptoms for themselves, especially vague ones like brain fog, and for another, when others see the incongruity between the real severity of the disease and what the media is treating it as, it feeds virus scepticism. The truth is covid is extremely infectious and especially dangerous for vulnerable groups, who cannot easily avoid it due to its infectiousness, but you'll probably be fine; that is, unless you worry yourself into a nervous breakdown.
I'm very sorry to hear that about your friend, people are suffering badly of course; but the truth is the prevalence of that sort of anecdotal evidence, true as it may be, is causing the disease to be widely misrepresented, and the damage that sort of panic can do should also not be ignored, especially if there's gonna be another year of this
'Long haul' in your link does not really mean permanent or semi-permanent, it also includes people who have symptoms lingering for a few weeks or a couple months, and it includes symptoms more easily attributable to stress, anxiety, and depression, which naturally imo follow on from having a plague - especially one everyone is saying will do you nasty lasting damage - as well as minor symptoms such as my own lingering effects of corona, which are nowhere near 'losing all taste' in terms of QoL. That is a higher number than I was thinking but the article does temper it down and I think its still valid.
People unreasonably fearing they'll die or get really hurt of virus is probably the only thing saving us in America, which is why I wouldn't spread this talk elsewhere; I think the only real problem with this post is the OP might stress themselves to death due to that overestimation of their risk, but its not problematic as such. But it speaks to a very depressing truth about the virus and are society, how the social responsibility to protect the weak is totally subsumed by the self-centered will to not suffer pain. That makes me very angry and so I posted to harvest hatred to reflect that back out at the world. Its a little more than that though; when I posted last night I did not expect this thread to go as far as "boomers have less years left and thus are less valuable", which makes me feel vindicated in my initial upsetness
Ok, if you want to talk practicality, OP is a potentially incredibly virulent vector of infection if they catch Covid. The point of the vaccine, as we don't have enough to vaccinate everyone, is to eliminate the most potent avenues in which the virus can spread, aka people who are FORCED to come in contact with hundreds if not thousands of people, many of whom do not wear masks
That's a good point, infuriating that those stay at home doctors were given vax before nurses in the same hospital.
Edit: for example I mean, I agree with your logic in the case of frontline medical workers no doubt
