My First COVID vaccination

My first COVID vaccination

Thank you for that, Gavin. Very interesting.

I rather suspect arrangements in Scotland may be better organized. I had my first flu vaccination in the town hall here in Greenock a few weeks ago; all very smoothly and efficiently run. Grace (my wife) had hers last week.

My wife and I had our flu vaccination in September at the same venue. No queue, all done in four minutes. I think the problems this Wednesday were down to the special handling requirements of the Pfizer vaccine and the inexperience of the staff. The staff were as helpful as they could be in the difficult circumstances, and I surmise that the elderly patients’ patience could be explained by an unwillingness to hurt the feelings of young people who were doing their best. This trope must be very common, I think.

:thumbup:

For sure, I wasn’t intending any criticism of the people on the front line. In England as in Scotland, they’re ordinary people doing their best.

Any difference between England and Scotland is at government level.

Apparently one of the Anti-vaxers said on a social media platform “you can stick the vaccine up your ar**”

Now as you know I’m not medically qualified but my contacts tell me that doesn’t match normal vaccination protocols, but hey if it floats their boat…

and after that small item, more seriously, there have been no delays in our facility which is indoors – the SODA¹ ward is a “temporary”² vaccination clinic.
No reported problems with scheduling systems³ (believe me I’d hear if there were)

Up the road the health centre was doing flu jabs. The wife was given a 4-minute slot (do not arrive early). In one door and out another to maintain social distancing.
Hospital staff of course get regular encouragement to “pop along” and get the jab.

¹ Surgery On Day of Admission

you can stick the vaccine up your ar**

I can’t imagine the pain trying to stick the vaccine up your ass :)
Anyway…

Shouldn’t that be ‘vaccine up my’

Shouldn’t that be ‘vaccine up my’

In the words of Badfinger – “If you want it, here it is, come and get it…”

Shouldn’t that be ‘vaccine up my’

Speaking in the third person

@DavidS

Not sure it would stay inside the body long enough to sufficiently absorb into the system.

One word: suppositories

I have a feeling a greater degree of comfort might be achieved if they make sure it’s not still at the storage temperature if they want to try that approach. :)

a 4-minute slot (do not arrive early). In one door and out another to maintain social distancing.

Exactly as in Greenock, but ours were being done in the council chamber in the town hall. The Covid vaccinations are being done in the hospital, which happily is a five minute walk from home. But at only 71 I’m quite a way down the list, and Grace at 64 even further down.

I have a feeling a greater degree of comfort might be achieved if they make sure it’s not still at the storage temperature if they want to try that approach. :)

Or have a needle on one end :)

@ Cirus
The webpage at your link appears to be gobbledegook. I understand individual words, sometimes pairs of consecutive words, but phrases of more than three are mostly unintelligible to me. Was this document created by a human being, I wonder? It is certainly not ordinary English. Medical-sales-speak perhaps? Or computer generated?

it’s medical, a protocol for preventing and treating COVID-19. (Medical people would find mathematics way more difficult to read!). It proposes a combination of keeping distance, wearing a face mask, washing hands, vitamin C, D and zinc, some more therapeutics and a cheap antibiotic against, mainly tropical, intestinal parasites, ivermectin. As is the case for hydroxychloroquine there is less hope than in April that this is a wonder drug, and it can have its side effects – consult your GP. Wikipedia has more on ivermectin, for a start. Most of its other recommendations do make sense, see for instance www.news-medical.net to keep ahead of all the news

For now, the Ivermectin did not prove clearly to be efficient. The studies are still too weak.

The studies are still too weak.

It’s not really the studies that are weak, it’s the medication that’s too weak (like probably zero) to show up in the studies. Of course the manufacturers would love to have another sales channel, so the waters will get well muddied for as long as possible. (Five and a half years running the office that produced a couple of relevant journals was quite an eye opener…)

Nice, relevant cartoon from xkcd yesterday: https://xkcd.com/2400/

It’s not really the studies that are weak, it’s the medication that’s too weak

I mean, the results of the studies.

Well we should be getting useful results from them in a few years, for now we are supposed to be good little guinea pig to be experimented on.

No.

There is certainly a risk that the immunity conferred by the vaccine won’t last very long; it’s possible to be revaccinated at intervals if that’s the case – as it is with several existing, well-established vaccines.

There is certainly also a risk that the vaccine will have negative consequences, possibly serious ones, in the future. Ideally, this would be avoided by doing long-term tests of the kind I presume you’re envisaging. There is a balance of risk here, however: the alternative is to let the pandemic run its course, with the enormous loss of life that would entail. No, I wouldn’t trust the pharmaceutical companies to judge that balance for me; but yes, I do trust the regulators to do it. No, the regulators aren’t perfect, but they know more about the question than I do (or you do), and I believe them to be honestly doing their best.

I believe them to be honestly doing their best.

I also. I will not be cajoled into irresponsible paranoia. When I was small I was a difficult child, and only with reluctance admitted to being a member of the human race. As I grew older I perceived that between bolshiness and passivity there was plenty of space for growing up.

There have been reports from testing that it works for a shorter time period from the natural immunity

There have? I think I’d have heard them if they came from the people actually doing the testing. All I’ve heard is that they don’t know how long it will last yet – that is, most people who’ve had the vaccine haven’t contracted Covid. It’s worth noticing also that of those few who have contracted Covid, none have been seriously ill.

The general expectation is that immunity will last at least a couple of years, and may be lifelong – for most, but not all, recipients.

No vaccine in the history of medicine has provided a better immunity than getting over the same desease provides.

This is true; but no vaccine in the history of medicine has worked in the way that either the Pfizer or the Astra-Zeneca vaccine work. Nonetheless, it may well be true of these vaccines too, it remains to be seen. The immunity conferred on patients who have had Covid appears to be at least ten months, and possibly lifelong, in the majority of cases. There have been cases of reinfection, but that’s (obviously) in individuals in whom the immunity didn’t last very long. Exactly what percentage of the population that is true of is not yet known, as far as I’ve seen – but it must be quite low, or it would be known by now.

It’s not ten months on the vaccine, it’s at least ten months immunity from having the disease – and that’s on the basis that most people who’ve had the disease have not had it again.

So how do people expect that when the desease only provides at most 45 days immunity the vaccine can provide many times that? That would be a medical merrical, and contrary to the published reports.

Stepping away from SARS-COV-2 to something with a longer study time:
Any report stating that the FLU vaccine produces immunity for only a matter of days is tosh.
The vaccine produces an enhancement of the body’s ability to defend against the virus by teaching it how to recognise and fight the virus.
The reason for revaccination annually is that different strains (with minor mutations) “do the rounds” so each year is a different vaccine based on the best guess of the strain or strains they expect that year.
Offhand I don’t recall whether there are 4 or 5 main strains that pretty much do a rota to dump on us on a planetary basis.

Returning to SARS-COV-2:
Any report making claims in any direction about SARS-COV-2 immunity beyond 10 months is speculation.
How long have people been testing vaccines for SARS-COV-2?

Bear in mind the virologists have been studying the Corona virus family for decades, the patterns are known.
This particular Corona virus is nastier than most.
As the recent mutated strain in the SE UK shows some mutate and pick better infection abilities.

The main thing to consider when looking at vaccination, or naturally acquired immunity, is the effect generating this is exposure to a sub-critical viral load. In naturally acquired immunity multiple small doses of the any virus trigger a learned reaction from the immune system.
Repeat the small doses over a long enough period and the body knows how to deal with the next, possibly higher, dose. Read up on viral loading.

If you have a compromised immune system, illness or age, that learning doesn’t work so well and the vaccine isn’t going to do enough teaching. Then you have a problem.

I am hoping this means that I have a natural immunity, as it would mean that it is possible to have a natural immunity

Of course it is, you just need to be repeatedly exposed to a sub-critical dose and repeat that forever to maintain the status of your immune system.
Of course if you are sick with something else then the sub-criticality level is lower so you could get the active infection.

I hope it to be accurate, unfortunatly we do not have enough information yet to know what the rate of immunity for most is.

If you admit that there isn’t sufficient data, why on earth do you keep arguing about the length of time for which immunity is conferred? I’m sure that you must have more important things to do considering the wide variety of topics upon which you post.

So please do not use a different deaseas with a longer immunity responce as a point of comparison.

I chose a corona virus to compare with a corona virus

EVERY desease that has ever had a vaccine made for it has only had an immunity to said desease that is at most equal to the immunity created by having had the desease (as it is done by creating the same kind of imune system responce, that is how ALL vaccines work by the definition of what a Vacccine is). You do not have to like it, it is fact.

Sub-critical viral loading. I used the phrase quite deliberately.
I mentioned the virologists across the car park too. I’m in IT support – for the Teaching Hospital.

Of course it is, you just need to be repeatedly exposed to a sub-critical dose and repeat that forever to maintain the status of your immune system.

That is called vaccination.

No it isn’t, it’s just exposure to a sub-critical viral load. Vaccination is a method of achieving a controlled exposure to an agent that might be a debilitated form of the actual infective agent or a similar agent – like the agent used for smallpox, derived from cowpox.

So All i am saying is do not try to argue it longer until there is data to support such an argument. That is all I am arguing.

Actually, you’re saying that it might be 45 days or longer but until there is more data over a long period then any statement of a specific period is unproven.

I said that stating only a matter of days is tosh, I also said that statements of times over 10 months is speculation.

Statement of fact: the whole time period of study is too short.

One thing I know to be a fact: A patient recovering from Covid can suffer a relapse into various of the Covid symptoms on more than one occasion in the months after the primary bout of illness. This does not require that the patient is re-infected.
Whether Pfizer and others have factored that into their investigations is an interesting question.