There is a God after all.....

H Scott Apley was a Texas GOP leader who has a public Facebook profile full of anti vax and anti mask rhetoric. He died a few days ago, from COVID. His last FB posts are still there.

His wife has a go fund me campaign to cover hospital bills. Appretnely when it reached its target, the target went up another $20k.

Grifting seems to have infected the GOP.; another sad legacy of Trump.

Oh if you think Grifting only started with Trump in the GOP I got this bridge…

It’s amazing how many well heeled folk in Politics are linked to big pharma. Queensland’s CMO Dr Jeanette Young’s husband is Professor Graeme Nimmo. He has served on advisory boards for Novartis, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Janssen-Cilag. If that isn’t a conflict of interest then what is?

Perhaps ex-LNP Chief of Staff Kieran Schneemann now serving as the head of the Government Affairs team at the Australian arm of AstraZeneca qualifies?

It's too bad Jeanette Young isn't one Scotty's advisors, we might have ended up with more Pfizer :suspect:

Theres nothing conspiratorial about that. A CMO would be likely to be married to someone else in the medical field. Professor Nimmo is one of Australia’s best medical scientists, medical professors and has been on the top board in Australia for his chosen field for microbiology and drug resistance. He has published 130 peer reviewed papers. And at some point he has probably provided technical advice to a large range of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Is it a big conspiracy that at some point the top regulators in Australian Aviation would’ve worked for an airline? No, so similarly nothing conspiratorial in this case.

Given that apparently somewhere around 1 in 70,000-100,000 persons suffer a blood clot after taking Astra-Zeneca, I'm surprised that at least some research hasn't been communicated identifying those at greater risk of clots other than "you are at greater risk if you are under 60".

As hundreds of millions of AZ vaccines have been administered and thus a relatively large number of subsequent clots have occurred, I would have thought a trend would be identified by now, thus identifying those at greater risk and allowing greater 'minimal-risk' use of AZ in the community.

Any GP will tell you that as one ages the risk of a blood clot diminishes.

Seriously, the blood clot occurrence is minuscule, we have talked about it in relation to being struck by lightning or winning a lottery.

To put it in real perspective, women take the pill daily, you have between 1 in 3000 to 1 in 10,000 chance of a clot over a year of use depending on what method you use. If you are on the pill, then worrying about AZ giving you a clot or whatever is just nuts. Just conspiracy theory hackjobs spreading this crap.

Sitting at your computer for more than an hour a day will increase your risk of DVT significantly as well as sitting in a plane, watching excessive television, etc etc.

Stop making stupid excuses, get vaccinated.

If you are susceptible to clotting, due to family history or whatever, see your GP and get a vaccine that doesn't do that.

Why do you feel you have the right to tell others to get vaccinated?

Specifically why do you have the right in this instance? If the poster has always been vaccinated before but has a bad feeling about these vaccines, perhaps that’s a function of the new media environment and the disastrous record of the health bureaucrats lately..hesitancy seems totally understandable these days

I can tell you what ever I want, you don't have to do it. If you are offended by being asked to get a jab for the greater good, then something inside you is conflicted.

Even if i had the power to 'order' you to vaccinate I would not, that is your choice.

What is the goal we are aiming for?? If this is a war..when have we won. The CDC is flat out saying that vaccinated people can carry the virus and infect others at a decent rate so I’m guessing with 100% vaccination the virus will still be around moving through the community, mutating and so forth. What then?

Presumably many against the vaccine in here are airline pilots in Australia - I’ve got some bad news for you….

• Tier one: workers who may come into close contact with a positive case, such as an airline worker or hotel quarantine worker

at very best you’ll be classified as tier 2. But that’s still workplaces like aged care, where workers are already required to be vaccinated to maintain their employment.

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia...cb208685c365aa

Trial dates....
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746

Novel mRNA technology and (by definition) no long term safety data yet. Any pilot who can Notice, Understand & Think Ahead might want to conduct a very careful risk-benefit analysis before rushing into these vaccines, given the fragility of a Class 1 medical.

Personal risk from Covid-19 calculator:
https://www.qcovid.org/

Infection Fatality Rate of Covid-19 = ~0.15% (similar to influenza)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33768536/

Let's protect informed consent and not get carried away with hasty, gut reactions.

No point having a class 1 medical if you have no job.

Pfizer 1: Sore arm, tired and light headache. Lasted two days.
Pfizer 2, 6 weeks later. No side effects until day 3 when I had a bad round of diarrea.

My wife sleeps badly, and her side effect was good sleep for a week or so after Pfizer 1. Sore arm.
My son had flue like sympthom for a week or so after Pfizer 1.

We are grounded for 48 hrs after vaccination.
We don’t use the AZ vaccine after 0.003% of those vaccinated died from blood clots. The supply of Pfizer and Moderna is good enough to cover our need for vaccines.

More than 90% of those getting infected now are not vaccinated. Close to 70% of our population have had the first jab, 38 % both.
With 90% or better protection from the vaccines, they are doing what they are supposed to do.
The risk of getting infected is less than 10% if you get vaccinated, vs 90% or so for the non vaccinated. I would rather not fly with a colleague who is not vaccinated, but that is up to the company to decide, not me.

Several airlines now will not let you work if you don’t get vaccinated.

Our industry is dead if we don’t get this under control.

Mortality rate world wide:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

Can I ask how you have calculated that percentage please?

The UK data of about 50 deaths from around 30.8 million doses administered would be 0.00016 percent. If you were to do a rudimentary conversion of doses administered to people fully vaccinated by dividing the former by two, the percentage rises to 0.00032 percent. The Australian data of seven deaths from 6.8 million doses administered yields 0.0001 percent of doses administered and 0.0002 percent of those fully vaccinated.

Might you be out by an order of magnitude?

It appears that the risk of losing your medical is infinitely higher from the virus than the vaccine. Collapsed lungs, heart problems, long-term fatigue, blood clots etc are starting to mount with long Covid becoming a real issue. Don’t get sucked into the ‘survival rate’. Survival does not equal recovery.

mRNA vaccines do not play with your DNA or alter it in anyway. The Pfizer vaccine creates a replicating 'foreign' protein molecule that your immune system sees as foreign and activates. Your immune system then does everything naturally, no vaccine assistance at all, all it's doing is being say the rabbit at a greyhound race, getting all your bodys defenses to race in one direction and seek out that protein. How it works vs Covid, the same protein is found on the surface of Covid virus, so it teaches your immune system to latch onto that protein and see it as harmful and foreign.

Astrazeneca is a vector vaccine, so its basically antigen cells from a chimpanzee grafted onto an inert virus that stimulates your immune system to react, it focuses on a similar protein as the lure/activator. A difference in the AZ method is that the inert virus actually stimulates your antigens into a little overdrive as well as providing a cue for resistance.

Both vaccines work differently, but achieve the same thing, activating your immune system to do its's own thing. The vaccine in itself is not defeating Covid, your own immune system is.

Medical wise, FAA yes grounds you for 48 hours following any Covid vaccination, after then side effects determine return to work. I know a number of US pilots who are now grounded due to covid directly, particularly due to lung issues. Also the well known case of the BA pilot who died from it after a 4 month battle.

I'm sure your numbers are correct. We stopped the AZ vaccine early after 3 deaths, so the total number of vaccinated was rather low, around 120-130000. Around 0,0025 %

10 points to turbantime for his: "Don’t get sucked into the ‘survival rate’. Survival does not equal recovery."

I'd have to look into it further, but i'm pretty sure the US version of AZ was from two different sources to the Australian ones. Which for whatever reason had a different rating and were for emergency use only, some sort of manufacturing detail.

Australia had passed 130,000 doses of AstraZeneca being administered by late March. While there had been some deaths suspected of being linked to AstraZeneca reported in March the first deaths confirmed to be linked to AstraZeneca anywhere weren't reported until April. The third death in Australia linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine was in early July. Well over 5 million doses of AstraZeneca had been administered by then.

Canada temporarily suspended AstraZeneca after three deaths there in mid-May. At that time they had administered over 2 million doses of AstraZeneca.

Sweden and Denmark, as well as Germany and France temporarily suspended AZ in March due to cases of clotting and deaths continuing since it's introduction in Dec 2020. All except Sweden restarted using it after an analyses of the numbers showed the vaccine safe and only very low cases of this reaction. In late 2020 prior to introduction of AZ there was questions regarding it's testing and efficacy results in regard to an number of factors that also led to it being dragged through the mud by the press. All those questions have been answered in subsequent testing and analyses.

AstraZeneca has not been used in the US apart from Phase III trials. There were no deaths in those trials. There is currently no FDA emergency use authorisation.

Yes, my blue. It was early March when the first death thought to be related to AZ was reported.

Sorry, guys, I forgot to tell you I live in Euroland.

Just did my Class 1, and no change in blood pressure from pre vaccines.
Israel now reports a sharp increase of Delta Covid cases. They have the highest % of vaccinated in the world. The majority of cases are in the unvaccinated part of the population, so the vaccines do work. They do however have a lower protection against serious disease (about 40%) if you are vaccinated and get infected with the Delta strain.

I predict a tough year ahead for Australia.

Second AZ yesterday
No noticeable effect whatsoever

That's a common misconception. Israel has around 60 percent of the total population vaccinated (nearly 80 percent of the adult population). The UAE, Malta, Iceland, Singapore, Belgium, Canada all have higher rates of vaccination.

That is not what the data shows. Israel maintains an outstanding publicly available Coronavirus dashboard. It shows >80 percent efficacy against serious illness amongst the fully vaccinated and around 60 percent efficacy against serious illness amongst the partially vaccinated (one dose).

How does one access the English version of this site?

Good question. I just let Google translate do its thing.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....b71af19152.jpg

Thanks mate

Not quite. The second dose rates of TTP is close to 1 in 1 million with fatalities only about 15%. So we are talking 0.00001% at best for 2nd dose.

Myocarditis and pericarditis is about 1/50,000. Interestingly doesn't receive much media attention.

One thing that's obvious from this sad period of human history is that most can not understand how to interpret statistics.

When you have people that think 1 in 100 is an acceptable rate of disease and that 1 in 100,000 is to worry about I fear that basic math is lacking.

If you want a simpleton example, you fill the MCG to capacity (100,000), give them all Covid. If they are unvaccinated worst case scenario is around 5000 people die, that reduces to 2000 die if medical care is 1st world standard.

For a morbid example of what 2000 dead looks like, a Metro train has crush capacity for 1000, so 2000 dead is 2 full train-sets crammed with dead bodies so as it rolled passed you would just see dead bodies pressed against the doors and windows with no space.

If you were to fill the MCG with unvaccinated over 65s alone the death toll could be as much as 40,000 without care, Dropping to about 20,000 with 1st world standard care.

Empty and clean the MCG you then refill with Vaccinated people and spread the virus around, 1 person might die from the vaccine, at current rate of 97% reduction in deaths and serious side effects, 150 (based on the 5000 non care rate) would die from Covid. So a total Death toll of 151.

To use the train example, that would be 2 out of 12 cars (two sets) with seating for each dead rather than packed in.

Anything beyond 1 in 10,000 is so rare its barely worth thinking of, and anything under 1 in 1000 is considered commonplace. Hence why the medical occurrence ratings stop at 1:10,000 beyond that its statistically rare to null chance of occurring.

Im not sure who you are directing this at 43? I'm pretty strong on bio stats and epidemiology and can bore you to death at a Covid party on positive predictive values, risk ratio's and the differences between specificity and sensitivity. But you're right from the aspect that everything we do in life, including flying a plane involves an element of risk. Each of us just has varying degrees of acceptance of that risk. When it comes to vaccine's again there is a risk, but like you said, it's incredibly small. Is it not worth talking about? No, as everyone should be fully aware of what those risks are, but they're incredibly small too. In the words of Gladys, vaccines offer "Green Shoots!"

It's a general comment not aimed at anyone in particular. However stats beyond 1:10000 are so negligible that general life risks exceed them therefore it's really not worth mentioning. My point being the effects of sub 1:100 stats are noticeable, you would notice the dead for instance what happened in NY with freezer trucks full of bodies. Where getting anxious over 1:100,000 stats of getting a clot just is needless worry over something that is not a "risk" per se. And we can see how the general public responded to that overall. Over 1:10,000 you have already passed your chance of lopping a finger off with a mower today, or falling off a ladder and breaking a hip territory.

I just looked up some stats, and a Lawn Mower has about 1:10,000 chance of maiming a user. Shopping trollies have about a 1:20,000 chance of causing injury to a user requiring hospitalisation. Just silly numbers that wouldn't stop you using either.

Yes agree, but I hate these comparisons. Compare apples with applies. Eg Risk of death from blood clots between AZ and Pfizer. That's more meaningful. Secondly, there's a difference between maiming of finger compared to 25-75% of death with a cerebral thromboembolism. The likelihood is extremely low, but the outcome is reasonably bad (more of a better term-cant really get worse than death). But again the initial risk is extremely low. Just don't make indirect comparisons.