Honestly, I am against wide spread boosters until we can get the rest of the globe vaccinated. I had already posted about how HIV populations in Africa are being seen as a problem, because covid likes to stay in these people and mutate. The WHO thinks this might be where some of our new variants will come from. Until we vaccinate poorer countries, we are not going to see the end of these mutations.
There is some issue with the vaccine and children. There is an increased risk of myocarditis and the scientists are asking themselves tough questions about whether the incidence of side effects is more or less prevalent than the risk of severe covid in kids--since they are the cohort that seems least affected. Here's an NPR article on the debate:
COVID Vaccines In Teens And Myocarditis: What You Need To Know
There is some biological basis for ivermectin, but from what I understand, it gets negated in the body--it makes it harder for certain receptors to attract the virus, however, from what I have read, this only works in a petri dish out side of the body. However, ivermectin is still a drug they are regularly using in India, various South American countries and in Japan. This indicates to me that clinicians in those countries are seeing some benefit.
The vaccine isn't bad, however, legal immunity was waived--which means that if these vaccines end up really harming people, no one would be able sue these vaccine producers. And while this is generally okay with me for tried and true vaccines where companies are barely making a profit on them, we now have vaccine billionaires due to the patents on these medicines. There's nothing but up side because if this ends up to be like the opioid epidemic, they don't have to worry about being sued. I'm sorry, if there are is legal immunity for vaccines, there also needs to be no vaccine billionaires and no vaccine patents. The reason this thing is dragging like it is, is because of greed. If we opened up the patents and more of the world was able to produce the vaccine (which they are able to do despite some very ethnocentric articles that suggest that the West is only able to produce this), then we would seriously slow down the rate of mutation, and could get this thing under control.
I'm still reading about breakthrough cases, and I'm not really sure what to think. It seems that the vaccine is slowing hospitalizations which is really, really good, but it doesn't seem to stop the virus from spreading as much as we would like. I understand waning immunity, similar to the flu, but I'm more and more interested about the biology here.
I find that people that have been on the internet since they were younger are much more savvy than our parents. There are things my mom links to me that I just shake my head at. I think our parents have a real problem sorting out the BS versus what is real on the internet. I think that we have been on this thing long enough to have an internal ranking of plausibility, but we also know that we need to check a few sources because the internet is notoriously full of garbage. Our parents have a double issue of trying to figure out and implement their BS meter for the internet while also not being as savvy on using internet searches to validate information. What I'm saying is try not to get too frustrated with your mom. She's dealing with a lot of conflicting information and nothing is clear cut.
