Who Has Had the "VID"

Rebel,

Very sorry to hear about your daughter. The father of a close friend developed Bell's palsy after he got his first shot. Cannot say for sure if it was related or just coincidence but I know it was a difficult time for all of them. He has since recovered but it was a bit of a haul.

Doctors should take your daughter seriously, and as you indicate because of the testing that Gary mentioned we have a good idea of the overall and specific risks associated with not just SARS-CoV-2 vaccines but all of them on the market. Sounds like she might have had just such an effect, and I hope that it is truly benign. Thanks for sharing.

What is it about CC loving skiers that we are able to do what few can, post about COVID with divergent opinions and not have it turn to a total all out war?  It really is rare what we have here!

I can't tell you how many times I have just kept my mouth shut during this pandemic, especially where I work.  

So I do not share this a lot, but my daughter now has an abnormal EKG and has what are called heart PVCs that started after second Moderna vaccine.  She had a really difficult reaction and at the time the myocarditis was not really known about (do not know if she had this or not).  She came home for a break and her doctor sent her to a Cardiologist because she kept complaining about her heart (she was one of the first to get the vax).  Thousands of dollars of tests later, she is told there is no damage to her heart and she just has to learn to live with them -- just consider them to be annoying "heart hiccups".  Cardiologist also said for her to get different booster because most of the problems he has treated were from Moderna.  Wish we had known that prior.  

These are just facts for my family.  I am not telling anyone not to get a vaccine.  It is a decision your family has to make.  I will say I am with Denmark and Sweden on no Moderna vaccine for young adults.  There are other options with less cardiac side-effects.  

Before anyone wants to accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist PM me and I share images of all the bills.   

Regarding the military question, I have done C&P exams for the VA in the past.  I know how quickly someone like my daughter would have gotten a general discharge medical condition stamped on a DD214 if they developed a heart condition.  Yeah it is rare, but the problem is we do not know rare or frequent yet.  Current soldiers are the experiment and the data is still coming in.

In Colorado on a month long ski trip now and most people here are enjoying being outside and recreating. Life goes on. I’ve had all three shots and will gladly roll up my sleeve for as many more as it takes. I am center right and believe this is the greatest country in the world. Your mileage may vary as the country is very divided right now.  Enjoy life!

Larry,

You are correctly picking up some of the terrible communication surrounding COVID.

All of the shots have large amounts of clinical and real world data showing that your odds of hospitalization and death are dramatically reduced if you get COVID. Current estimates over the last year (so including Delta and Omicron) across all ages are that if you have had no vaccine shots you are 10X more likely to test positive and ~70X more likely to die from COVID-19 compared some somebody who has had three shots ("fully vaxxed and boosted).

Where the confusion creeps in is that expectations were never well grounded, and have always tended towards the overly optimistic in an effort to snowball people and keep things "feeling good" rather than being honest. Some disinformation was just ignorance.

Vaccines help you body fight off a disease by exposing it to some version of it before you become infected. Some of them are amazingly effective and last for decades or even your entire lifetime, like the ones for Yellow Fever, polio, and smallpox. Others are less so, as we've seen with flu. Nobody knows exactly why this is because the immune system is so complex. The vaccines developed against COVID-19 around the world vary in efficacy, but in general they reduce hospitalization and death by somewhere around 80-90% for about six months per shot. Hospitalization and death is what they are trying to protect against, so "breakthrough" infections while important are not the stick we should be measuring by.

Of course, the more people are vaccinated in a population, the more and more breakthrough infections we expect. Since something like 3/4 people in the US have had at least one shot, right off the bat we'd expect about 3/4 of infections to be "breakthroughs." The most recent numbers I've seen show that about half of the people who are testing positive have had two vaccine doses, 1/3 have not had any shot, and ~13% in people who have had three shots. But the vast majority of the hospitalized and dead have had few or no shots.

Most people who get in car crashes are wearing a seat belt. Some of them die. But we don't stop wearing seat belts precisely because the odds of surviving an accident go way up when you are wearing one. Focus on the overall effect of wearing the seat belt, not the fact that it doesn't work 100% of the time.

The bar for vaccines is hospitalization and death. The ones available in the US are the best in the world at preventing exactly that. Can you still get sick and die? Yes. But would you rather be wearing the seat belt or not if/when the crash occurs?

My family has avoided it so far.  All of us are vaxed and boosted.  I've worked and been out and about every day, not an option to stay at home and no desire to do so anyway.  Maybe I've had it without symptoms, who knows, but never have tested positive.

There's a new statistic that shows that people who do not lap in their props are 70% more likely to be hospitalized than those that carefully lap the prop and check with prussian blue.