For lack of a vaccine life as we know it has ground to a halt.
For lack of a vaccine Americans are being sickened in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.
For lack of a vaccine Americans are dying in the thousands, soon to be tens of thousands, ultimately hundreds of thousands and hopefully not millions.
Look what we’ve suffered for lack of ONE vaccine.
For lack of a vaccine the American economy is in free fall.
For lack of a vaccine the stock market has shed nearly a third of its value.
For lack of a vaccine we are entering another Great Recession and possibly a Great Depression.
For lack of a vaccine millions have already lost their jobs and millions more, possibly tens of millions more will do so.
For lack of a vaccine we have had to cancel every high school graduation, every college graduation and thousands of weddings.
For lack of a vaccine we must stay in our homes, leaving only to get more food. We must keep our distance from even those we love the most.
For lack of a vaccine we take our lives in our hands every time we do leave our homes no matter how desperate the need.
For lack of a vaccine hospitals are being overwhelmed with seriously ill and mortally ill patients.
For lack of a vaccine we may exceed our ability to care for them and people will die because there are not enough ICU beds and ventilators to save them.
For lack of a vaccine we are setting up hospitals in stadiums and fields.
For lack of a vaccine our friends and loved ones are dying alone, separated from spouses, children and parents — the ones who could bring them precious comfort.
For lack of a vaccine we are running out of space in morgues.
For lack of a vaccine our family and friends cannot attend the funerals.
Think we don’t need vaccinations? Think they are a plot by Big Pharma? Think natural immunity is enough?
Look what we’ve suffered for lack of ONE vaccine. Now you have a glimpse of what life could be like before there were any.
Within a year or two there will be a vaccine for COVID-19. Millions of people will rush to get it. Like the flu, they may need a new vaccine each year and millions will readily comply.
And within a generation or two anti-vaxxers will be back to their inane conspiracy theories, as if the world was not convulsed in 2020 for lack of a vaccine.
For lack of a vaccine vaccines will be delayed.
Here, at least. As part of the precautions taken here, pregnant women’s visits to hospitals for tests have been reduced, save for tests that are strictly necessary. Same with newborn shots. SIL is going to give birth without all tests she could have had – should have had – otherwise and Amazing Niece No 2 is going to miss some of the vaccines, for it’s deemed unwise to bring babies over for such visits. We hope this gets fixed some time in autumn.
For lack of a vaccine.
I’m actually quite worried there are a lot of bored potatoes out there with a lot of time on their hands all of a sudden.
Currently, they are trolling Zoom meetings.
Seriously, I have heard of people trolling PhD defenses and even kids’ activities with porn and other shit. I mean, how sad of a life must you have if you crash a kid’s dance lesson to spam it with porn?
If anti-vaxxers think naturally acquired immunity via exposure is the strongest and ‘true’ immunity, why aren’t they volunteering to work on the front line, looking after patients with active infection, helping out in the ICU, laying out the bodies in the mortuary? Surely they have the courage of their conviction and want to prove to the world that they were right all along?
Well… I hate to say this, but I have heard talk of “corona parties…”
I know I’m being incredibly optimistic and naive, but I thought ‘corona parties’ were zoom/facebook parties intended to take the place of real parties which had been planned but had to be cancelled. E.g., my boyfriend is a DJ (hobby, not job). He was meant to be doing an event last Saturday but obviously it couldn’t go ahead, so he and the other DJs who were supposed to have been doing sets that night posted their playlists to the event’s Facebook group at the times they were meant to have been on.
Please tell me that this is the case. For the sake of my faith in humanity …
I’m afraid not.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/us/alabama-coronavirus-parties-trnd/index.html
There was one potato in Canada who filmed himself sneaking in to a hospital that has been set aside for mass casualties and is currently empty to “prove” its all a hoax, there is no virus blah blah. He wore a mask though. Weird.
Look, I can’t even get people who are frequent flyers to the paint department where I work to fill out an application to work as a clerk to kill two birds with one stone (e,g, if you are going to be here all the time to repaint your house during a pandemic because the boredom is just too much, get hired and give the rest of us a break.)
I really doubt you’re going to get many takers to help out in the food service or laundry areas since that’s too easy to flag as “potentially risky”.
It turns out that people are ok with risk as long as they get to control when and where they are exposed. Oh, and as long as they go home with Revere Pewter or Agreeable Gray.
Maybe they’re in the same situation as me. I got put on furlough 3 weeks ago. We were told it’s guaranteed till the end of the month (i.e. tomorrow), at which point it will be reviewed and we could be recalled to work at any point afterwards. I would’ve taken a job somewhere they’re crying out for workers (fruit-picking or a warehouse job came to mind,) but I thought, with only 3 weeks off guaranteed, by the time I’ve got the job and been trained up to the point where I’m reasonably competent, it’ll be time to go back to the job I’d been furloughed from. Thus I would’ve wasted not only my time, but also the time of the poor sod who had to train me for a job I did for less than a month.
Sure – but did you violate a state and city level stay-at-home order to purchase non-essential supplies during those three weeks? That’s the bigger issue here.
In most retail shops, we fully expect that 50% of workers will wash-out in a month or less. Retail isn’t for everyone – and that’s fine. Since this post, we’ve hired 4 people for my department who were furloughed from their real jobs. One has returned to work at their original job (and works an evening or two on the side with us.) The rest are still waiting for their jobs to reopen.
Some bio-ethicists are proposing to do a human challenge trial for vaccine candidates. If that happens, anti-vaxxers will have a field day.
https://www.futurity.org/human-challenge-study-coronavirus-vaccine-2324142-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=human-challenge-study-coronavirus-vaccine-2324142-2
I’d volunteer for that. Seriously, I would. Though I disagree with Eyal when he says that volunteers shouldn’t be selected if they’re motivated by money. Because, although I’m all up for altruistically helping to speed up the development of a potentially life-saving vaccine, I’m still gonna need a few quid to cover my costs (time, transport etc).
At the risk of sounding like an AI who was programmed with Utilitarian Software to improve humanity’s condition and took things way too far: how about recruiting volunteers from death row? If they survive, their sentence gets commuted to life imprisonment. Maybe throw in the possibility of parole in a decade or two if you wanna be generous. If it all goes wrong and they die of the Covid-19 they were intentionally infected with, well, you just changed their method of execution from lethal injection/firing squad/electric chair/whatever you yanks use these days to ‘Death by Covid’. That way, the ethical issue of “If the vaccine is ineffective and the volunteer dies from the subsequent intentionally-inflicted Covid infection then, in a way, the volunteer was killed by those conducting the experiment” is averted because in this case, the experimenters were trying to save the volunteer’s life but, despite their best efforts*, failed to do so. Trying but failing to save someone’s life is far more ethically defensible than accidentally but foreseeably ending someone’s life.
*I reckon that experimenters putting forward such a proposal would be far more likely to get somewhere than a run-of-the-mill anti-death-penalty protester is. Say the chances of success for these two groups are 80% and 10% – numbers I plucked out of thin air, but which will do for the sake of making my point. Then say that a prisoner participating in the experiment has a 5% chance of dying from the experiment – this is on the very high end of the current estimates of the mortality rate for Covid-19. Someone who wishes to save the life of a death row inmate whose appeals have been exhausted would have a 76% chance going the experiment route – more than 7 times the chance they’d have devoting their efforts to getting the death penalty repealed altogether. Though of course, this person could always do both – campaign for the abolition of the death penalty while selecting those whose execution dates are drawing close for inclusion in the experiments.
Will be spreading this post far and wide.
There are no ‘conspiracy theorists.’ Refer to your condescending article pertaining to the ‘null hypothesis,’ and, ‘what laypeople don’t understand.’