Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Doctors fighting back against anti-vaxers online

Something like that is already happening with people who refuse to wear masks. In Texas, where their governor killed the state mask mandate, he said businesses can keep on enforcing their own rules. People are getting arrested for trespassing when they refuse to mask up or leave in stores that require it. Once enough people get their immunizations, I suspect we will get "immune passports" that let you go without a mask (if you are dumb enough to do that!) Then I bet it's going to get really limiting to refuse masks and vaccination. It will be volunteering to be a second-class citizen. Like having to find a "Colored" bathroom in the old South.

Kinda like shaming the dummies?

Could be much worse, like when all the supermarkets in town require masks and you have to drive 50 miles for your shopping at a little independent market that is run by an anti-masker.

Which puts the people driving those 50 miles to avoid supporting the Walton family’s goal to drive Americans into poverty in a conundrum: Shop at WalMart and support the exploitation of minimum wage workers and the creation of food desserts, or risk your life by shopping in an independent store run by a pandemic ignoramus.

OR they are just sticking together! I have noticed that they seem to have an answer for just about everything!

Idaho State Legislature shut down for two weeks due to a Covid outbreak...

I get my first dose next SA 03/27 @ 4PM. Not sure who the manufacturer is....didn't list it.

...but because it's the "first dose" - it's going to be Pfizer or Moderna. Moderna seems to be the dominate vaccine here in the Puget Sound. Everyone I know who has been vaxxed has had the Moderna vax.

My preference is for the Pfizer vaxx, but I'll take what I can get.

I don't think the two mRNA vaccines have any significant difference. That's the same day my wife gets her second Pfizer vaccination. I'm Moderna. Neither was a problem. Time between doses does not seem to matter much, as long as it's three weeks or over. Mine was 5 weeks.

Question for P_I_A:

We know that non-vaxxed people can be asymptomatic and spread COVID. We know that being vaxxed is no guarantee not to get COVID - but the thinking is: If the vaxxed person does get COVID, it won't be as severe - no hospitalization and no death

My question: Can a vaxxed person get COVID and be asymptomatic? (I am going to guess yes)

I personally think reinfection happens all the time. No matter if you are vaccinated or had the disease, if you are exposed to a heavy viral load, it's going to be a while before your immune system manages to kill all the virions. When you are exposed to a small load, that infection time may be minutes. Immunologists talk about a "sterilizing vaccine", which means the vaccine is so effective that any virus is immediately attacked and you never do shed enough to pass it to anybody else. The Covid vaccines are not that effective. Very few vaccines are.

You have to be shedding enough virions to infect anyone else. When they test people by PCR, they talk about CT counts which are the number of cycles they need to double the RNA from the swab before it can be detected. If they have to double it 40 times to get a positive, you will infect nobody. People with a full blown infection have CTs of 10 or less. That's billions of virions they are shedding.

So I think a vaxxed person CAN be infected, but very likely will be asymptomatic and not contagious. That's why CDC said vaccinated people can socialize with other vaccinated people without masks. But I would not want to have close contact with anybody unvaccinated without masks: You could get enough of a viral load to carry it home to some unvaccinated person and make them sick or even dead, even though you remain asymptomatic.

On a different topic: When Long Covid victims get vaccinated, about half of them feel a lot better after about two weeks. There are currently two theories as to what's going on.

1) Their immune system is in disregulation. When they get the vaccine, their immune system goes into "war mode" and then after all the vaccine antigen is dismantled, it goes into the normal "system reset" mode. Kind of like unplugging your computer and then plugging it back in when it is hung up.

2) Corona viruses are gut residents in bats, and cause no illness. In humans with Long Covid, the viruses remain infecting the gut for the long term without stimulating a full blown immune response. (We tolerate a lot of foreign antigens in our guts.) The vaccination makes enough antibodies to wipe out those gut viruses.

There is some evidence for both theories! We know Long Covid victims have disregulated immune systems. And researchers found viral RNA in fecal swabs long after normal nasal swab tests went negative.