dera

Maybe we need something like a 2 week stay at home order to flatten the curve a bit!

GojetFires

I'm vaccinated, still think everything should get the vaccine. However, looking at the data I'm finding it hard to support my own beliefs. Israel, over 80% vaccinated for over a while, a booster shot, and their cases are worse than before.

YangGang2020

The justification is resources at the hospital level. The government was forced to choose between vaccine mandates or rationing health care. Rationing healthcare kills people and the vaccine doesn’t (In virtually every case). Therefore the government chose mandates instead. Besides their life saving potential, vaccines can minimize the damage of new variants and the economic destruction caused by them. We can all agree rationing healthcare away from anyone is unethical.

An antivax or personal choice advocate would oppose the mandates and accepts the fact hospitals will be overrun. The vaccinated then are having their freedoms trampled since they lose access to health care. It’s a different form of communism really. The vaccinated pay the burden of the unvaccinated. A form “don’t tread on me types” seems to be ok with.

And mandates do work. Upsets some people, but they work.

Skyward

You’re ignoring the facts. The gov was not faced with those decisions. Hospitals were not overrun everywhere as you describe. In fact, temporary covid hospitals were constructed and sat empty. Hospitals that reach capacity now don’t do so because of covid, they do so because of poor government policies (like vaccine mandates) that are causing a shortage of staff.

There are plenty of vaxed covid patients taking up hospital beds. Don’t fool yourself. Even many in the hospital BECAUSE of the vax. I personally know someone that died after taking it.

Why do so many people act like the vaccine is the only way out of this? It is not

jacinth

The hospitals have not even gotten back to 2019 levels. The rolling 7 day average of patients crashed during lockdown March 2020 and as of the end of July 2021 which is the latest I have seen the number updated we were still under 2019 levels. The hospitals were never at risk. In GA we have around 16,000 patients a day in the hospital since May 2020. Doesn’t matter if it’s covid peaks or covid valleys. If you look at the data they always match perfectly with non covid valleys and peaks. In the end the TOTAL amount of people in the hospital is still around 16,000 no matter if covid has peaked or not and it has been like that every single day since May 2020. In terms of total numbers there is no evidence whatsoever of a pandemic.

ZapBrannigan

In many locations it isn't the physical ability to build more ICU beds or rooms. Heck here in Dallas they took a giant convention center downtown and converted it. It's the lack of ICU doctors and nurses to serve that surge capacity. You can't just grab a random MD or nurse and say "you're a Covid ICU person now". These are specialized positions that require training and experience. Furthermore many COVID ICU patients linger for weeks in the ICU, taking up resources that might have otherwise been used to help patients recovering from heart surgery, or car accidents, or who knows what else?

So if you say that vaccines aren't the only way out of the pandemic, then what is?

Natural immunity may work... or it may be like the cold or flu that you get every year as it continues to mutate. Furthermore because this is still a novel virus, we have no idea what the impact to the body are. We've been so busy trying to treat Covid pneumonia and keep people from dying that very little research has gone into what these long covid symptoms really mean in the body. What is physically happening that is causing alteration of taste and smell months after recovery? Long term fatigue? Brain fog? Blood clots (according to Sanje Gupta on the Joe Rogan podcast 60 times more likely to get blood clots from the Covid19 virus than from any of the vaccines)

If the answer is therapeutics, we may get there but we aren't there yet. Monoclonal antibodies, aside from being WAY more expensive than a vaccine dose are great, but they are temporary, don't teach the body how to fight Covid next time it sees it, and is issued under an emergency use authorization same as most of the vaccines - meaning many of the arguments against vaccination are the same arguments being ignored to get the monoclonals to try and stay out of the hospital. ("My body is a temple and I don't know what's in it")

Antivirals are on the horizon. Hopefully they'll be efficacious and have few side effects. But it could be months or years before they're available from your CVS pharmacy. So what we have now are three highly efficacious vaccines - that may or may not require a 3rd dose- that have been injected 6 billion times around the globe for over a year, with few side effects that are typically milder than the virus itself.

When Trump announced that he had cut the red tape and allowed these things to be fast tracked last year, I was sure that we were months away from this whole thing being behind us. And he we are almost a year later still fighting it. Not so much in everyday life because most everything is open again, even if sometimes you have to wear a mask. But as an airline we NEED corporations to feel comfortable staffing their offices again, allowing people to travel and attend trade shows again. Our industry can't survive unless business gets back to some semblance of pre-Covid normal.

So if vaccination isn't the cornerstone upon which companies feel comfortable doing that... then what is?

RJSAviator76

Using normal therapies and medications. I just flew with 3 different captains who had COVID within the past 2 months. Down to the last one, they all got Ivermectin and they recovered quickly. One was spiraling down a tad, but as soon as he was able to get his hands on Ivermectin, it was a quick and dramatic improvement. Anecdotal? Maybe. You also have monoclonal therapies as well.

Thedude86

So the hospitals are short staffed, but we’re going to fire 10-20% of the staff because they’re not vaccinated? Even though most of these people have natural immunity from working in hospitals for the last 18 months? Doesn’t sound like they’re too worried about staffing levels. And if they are…why are they making it even worse?

People are back to normal. The only thing holding us back are the restrictions corporations and governments are putting in place world wide. Domestic travel is pretty much back to pre-covid levels. The only thing hurting air travel is international travel. Which again, isn’t because people are scared to travel outside the U.S. It’s because of the ridiculous rules still put in place. People have gotten on with their lives. Even the triple mask people are doing what they wanna do. They only thing holding us back are the ridiculous rules and restrictions. Not the virus.

Pilots have more to lose in salary and seniority by quitting so it might not have much of an impact on us, but if 10-20% of nurses are already being fired… how much more do you think air travel is going to improve when 10-20% of the entire country’s workforce doesn’t have a job because they don’t want to comply with King Biden’s mandates. Again, the restrictions are what is hurting the economy and air travel. Not the virus. Spend some time in a red state. No one gives a flying f. Everything is back to normal. The only time I have to play the stupid covid game is when I show up to the airport.

50% of the U.S. is fully vaccinated. In the age group that primarily dies of the virus (65 and older) over 80% are vaccinated. Yet, we now have MORE covid deaths in 2021 than we did in 2020 when NO ONE was vaccinated. Israel is over 85% double vaxxed. They’re over 60% triple vaxxed. Yet, in September, Israel had the highest covid case per capita in the entire world and more than they ever had last year when no one was vaccinated. They’re still one of the highest today. Plenty of countries less than 10% vaccinated doing much better. Even if King Biden mandates vaccines for every single man, woman, child, insert whatever pronoun it will be no more effective at stopping covid than if he mandated us to do the hokey pokey before bed every night. People have moved on. Lift the restrictions and watch air travel boom.

LUVisLost

The horse dewormer does not work. It has been disproved time and time again. Seriously it started off as a joke on FB and away it went. Find me ANY peer reviewed medical article that shows it works. I’ve looked and found none. I would bet the dewormer had killed more people than the vaccine has in the world but I haven’t seen anyone working on those stats.

Monoclonal therapies do work, 78 percent efficacy in one trial. That is great but not as good as vaccines. (Side note monoclonal antibodies are lab grown antibodies that started off harvested from a recovered patient, think about that if you don’t want some lab grown vaccine going into your body). The big thing is the cost. We are talking 6K a treatment and must be administered IV style. Vaccines are about 12-36 bucks to the government and free to everyone who wants one. Do the math if 5M people at 6K a pop, that’s a BIG 30B. That’s if only 5M get the treatment, just imagine if 100M need it?

Just amazes me pilots HATE it when an aircraft accident occurs and some “aviation expert” that has a private pilot license is on the news telling everyone what happened and usually misstating facts left and right, but when a pandemic hits they are the “medical experts”. Leave it to the adults, they are right a whole lot more than wrong.

RJSAviator76

Don't tell me. Tell that to these 3 guys who recovered quickly. As for calling it the "horse dewormer", you're showing your gullibility and how easily manipulated you are by the media. I reckon the world needs people like you - blindly obedient and parroting the narrative.

Fundamental difference... one is supposed to be a vaccine that carries some risk. Regardless of what you may think, we simply have not had enough time with these vaccines around to see what the long-term effects are. Some think this risk is acceptable, others do not. But the fundamental difference is that once you put this substance in your body, that's it... you don't get to say "oh crap, get it out of me!" Case in point, I had blood clots a few years back and I took J&J vaccine before it came out that it carried an increased risk of blood clots. 3 weeks later, the news came out and guess what... I couldn't go to my doctor and say "get that out of me, doc!" Tough luck...

With medication, I'm curing a confirmed illness. I'm simply blown away that this is even a valid discussion. Step away from politics of the vaccine and start thinking FOR YOU, not for me.
You mean like Fauci?