When COVID first started, I emailed my old friend Ian Lipkin, who was a consultant on “Contagion.” He told me to get to a safe place (namely, not Florida!) and to get the vaccine as soon as it became available.
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/profile/w-i-lipkin-md
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I assume you do not take the annual flu vaccination for the same reason?
Too many people selfishly did not take the vaccine and so provided fertile beeding grounds for mutations.
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The virus also bred in fully vaxxed people.
I also never took the flu shots, yes.
Possibly, with the number of people who would have got it simultaneously, and in a much more severe and transmissible form, it may have mutated into something much more deadly.
There was a lot of fake news at the time saying that the virus could only get less lethal (which actually happened) but that needn’t have been the case.
A virus can get so lethal it will kill the host before mass transmission and so can be easier to contain by effectively wiping itself out.
Or it could kill 50 million people like the 1918 Spanish flu.
I think because, as you wrote, four years on and we’re all ok (apart from those with long covid) doesn’t mean that this would be the case if nothing had been done.
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Please watch Ian’s TED at UIL.
24 minutes long with no clue as to the content, you are joking.
It’s a good overview of our response to COVID and what we can expect in future pandemics. This is a guy who’s spent decades discovering and designing responses to everything from dengue to Marburg to AIDS.
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Maybe the first thing is not do GoF research in a lab full of noobs and IDGAF‘ers?
We don’t really know how it started.
We have certain ideas about what most likely happened, but CCP and PLA are obviously not talking. And their accomplices in the US are making sure it all stays buried.
Workers need a minimum of a bachelor’s degree and several years of laboratory or medical safety experience.
Much of what was done here in Switzerland was because the Hospitals, in particular ICU units, were being overwhelmed.
It is a real mistake to assume that medical professionals, and politicians, had any idea what they were doing. That’s why we saw so many contrary decisions and kneejerk reactions.
We got through it by the skin of our teeth.
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The Swiss Influenza Pandemic Plan is an important planning instrument enabling the various actors (the Confederation, cantons and institutions concerned) to prepare for a pandemic, and facilitating international coordination.
This was used to guide the reponse to COVID
It is being updated based on COVID experience and a new version is expected by year end.
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I think, the final version depends on the results of the voting this week. 
Seems relevant!
Fauci is being interviewed (interrogated) by the US Congress today.
It seems to be composed of the usual poorly researched GOP attacks. They tried to blame him for the 6 feet social distance rule, but the CDC invented it, which was not part of his remit.
MTG said he should be imprisoned for the mask mandates.
A vaccine will not protect you for longer than the natural protection you get from catching the disease.
In the last week, Moderna got US approval for the Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) mRNA vaccine.
A number of clinical trials of mRNA vaccines against various cancers are having excellent results and will likely result in approvals being granted.
The big benefit of mRNA vaccines vs traditional ones is that the actual virus is not involved in the vaccine preparation so there is no risk of catching the actual disease.
For example, the “Cutter Incident” where a polio vaccine was given to 120,000 children containing a live virus, that sort of accident is not possible with a mRNA vaccine.
From the NYTs today:
As new variants of the coronavirus continue to gain traction, doctors and researchers are bracing for a potential rise in cases this summer. KP.2, one of these variants, now accounts for 28.5 percent of cases, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a small increase in Covid-related emergency room visits and positive tests.
and
In general, the more immunity you’ve built up from vaccination or past infections, the milder your next bout with the virus is likely to be.
So where do I get my booster?
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Italy registered its first covid death February 22. Ten days later the count was 79, another ten days later 1’266, and by March 23 the toll reached 6’077. By April 2, another ten days and 40 days after the first dead, the virus had killed 13’915.
By March hospitals got overwhelmed and the military had to be called in for assistance, and lockdowns put in place. I have no idea how you can say the lockdowns made no difference.
True, but the population is no better.
Instead of avoiding additional weight gain and slimming down the population relies on pills while blaming the food industry for their own gluttony and big pharma for making a profit on the mostly avoidable treatment.
“You made your bed, now lie in it”.
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It was mainly older people. These continued perishing over the next 18 months. Lockdown or not.
Italy just had the misfortune of having a lot of old people susceptible to viral infections of unknown nature.
Additionally, Italy had and has the largest expat Chinese community in Europe, mainly in Northern Italy. From what I have read, the virus was “brewing” there for quite some time before it hit the general population. As the Chinese people there are usually rather young, they didn’t die immediately like old people do.
And remember, while most keyboard-virologists like you and me could and did work from home, a lot of people just couldn’t anyway.
Shops were open, too (mostly).
Anyway, I would never say vaccines are not necessary.
But the “vaccines” we got for COVID were not what people generally attributed with vaccines. They were, at best, a flu shot.
If a disease can kill you, and the vaccine stops you from dying then I’d say it was pretty successful.
There’s no data (that I could find) of how many people die from the flu in a given year after being given the vaccine for that year’s flu as vaccination data is not recorded on death certificates.
Hey! I’m an older person with two chronic diseases. I deserve to live too.
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You were lucky.
A lot of vaccinated people still died.
And a lot of unvaccinated people didn’t die either.
Additionally, vaccinated people could still be infectious.
So, the whole political, social and even economic pressure to get vaccinated was a bit overhyped.
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