Thanks!
sudoLife
Karma: 12
Thanks for the info. I already have some minor heart issues, so this info worries me quite significantly. Could you please provide the source of those particular numbers?
Also, please share if you’ve done any related calculations / comparisons. I’d be very interested.
If you’re not bothered by injections and have appropriate technique then all you have to do is shoot saline in front of your mother.
I might do just that if I ever feel an urge to be confined in a psychiatry clinic.
The obvious problem with using OC on your relatives is that you typically have care for them.
Agreed, that’s something I’d use on my college peers, not relatives.
This situation is a test. It is not the last time you will be confronted with this kind of thing. If you favor science, then what do you think your logical course of action should be if prior courses have failed?
I have mentioned what action seems obvious at the end of my question. Persuasion will most likely fail. Plausible solutions are middle grounds and / or moving out.
Thank you for your thoughts.
Is this the most important thing for me to do right now?
To be honest, my mind draws a blank here. While it is not my top priority, the things as they are now might impact my mother’s health and sanity in the future. I wish there were a way to save everyone.
The issue comes from the default mode of “distrust authority and anyone with power while prioritizing persecuted-looking people’s words”. This comes from the elderly generation having grown in the totalitarian regime. A reasonable concern, but it also helps them discard any scientific papers if the guts disagree. Add to that scarce knowing of statistics, and we get what we get.
This was just a side note of why I might not succeed.
Also, because I read the last sentence of your post in a somewhat struggling tone (which may not be true, because words on a screen), I can share that doing a few sessions of talk therapy can be really helpful in a situation like this.
Yeah, you nailed me, but I think I can manage for the time being. I draw on joy and peace in other parts of my life. Not to mention talk therapy is expensive, and I’d have to be in significant trouble to prioritize allocating resources for that.
Yeah, I suppose this is the only way. I wish I could save her the money and emotional attachment, but I see no way to do it and every time I try, we just end up fighting.
Thanks for the amazing tool suggestion! I wonder why I’ve never seen it used in Lesswrong estimations before.
Maybe, at some point. I can certainly see how things can go downhill here, but then again, they are anyway.
Honestly, I think your chances to change your mother’s opinions on homeopathy are close to zero.
Agreed.
(Unless perhaps it is that case that someone else is pressuring her into homeopathy, and you could somehow undermine her trust in that third party. But that is manipulation.)
Her belief came to be when doctors predicted unhappy health developments unless she did this and that (meaning abortion and surgeries). Homeopathy wasn’t so unwelcoming, and somehow things have gotten sorted out on their own. So yeah, zero chance here.
You should have a doctor, who is different from your mother’s doctor.
Healthcare doesn’t work like this here, however our family doctor suggests nothing unconventional. The whole healthcare system here (free one, that is) seems to employ the “you are fine unless you are dying” strategy. Again, you can see how homeopathy might feel like a relief.
...and I felt happy
I feel that way every time I have a chance to rent an apartment for a while :)
I predict I would trap myself by hinting that I believe homeopathy and simply am afraid of injections (I’m not, but I take no pleasure either). Don’t you think so?
Hm, I might put it to use at some point, thanks for the concept!
Unfortunately, right now I am being coerced into taking an immunity “boost”, whose desired outcome is not really possible to measure. “Your immunity will get stronger” is too vague.
And of course, I am not going to have it instead of a Covid vaccine as I am being told to do.
Hm,
But maybe VAERS is more under-reported than that, and a factor of 10 is more fair?
It may be a negative slope: the more serious a side effect is, the more it gets reported. Going by that, a factor of two or three for blood clots sounds pessimistic enough. Then we’d still be somewhere around the base rate.
This study estimates the risk of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) and portal vein thrombosis (PVT) following Covid-19 diagnosis vs vaccination (mRNA).
Excluding those with prior history of CVT or PVT, we get 3.53/100K and 17.5/100K cases, respectively. This includes both hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients.
Also, for CVT
Among the 23 events, 7 were observed in patients under the age of 30, 4 between 30 and 39, 2 between 40 and 49, 3 between 50 and 59, 2 between 60 and 69, and 5 between 70 and 79.
I am afraid if we only look at the relevant group (e.g. under 30, hon-hospitalized), we will end up with too small a sample to draw any conclusions, so I’m not going to do so. But excluding those with prior history seems to be a good choice.
Supposing nobody gets both CVT and PVT, we end up with a total of 21.03/100K cases. This is still 2.6 times more than your worst-case scenario. Of course, the probabilities are not adjusted for those recovered from Covid-19 and having natural immunity, in which case the risk probably goes down drastically.
The study itself concludes you’re about 10 times more likely to get thrombosis from Covid-19 than from Pfizer/Moderna. I wonder how Jannsen compares to that.
Side note: my mother had a contact with an infected individual. Coincidentally, she tested for antibodies soon after that, and found out they shot up quite drastically (about 7-fold) from almost not existing to a decent level. This gets me thinking just how pointless it is to race after constantly high levels. Haven’t we known for a good deal of time that the immune system produces what’s necessary at the moment?
Thank you! I have edited my post, which hopefully will bring more clarity.
There was a lot of hubub about blood clots regarding Janssen but that turned out to be nothing.
Hmm, source? I have found this, it’s rather new. I agree that the numbers are somewhat low. However the law of big numbers still applies. Maybe you happen to have more recent statistics with mentioned risk groups?
If you want a single Pfizer, though, you can just get one. There’s no way to force you back in for the second dose.
Ah, I should mention that I’m in America.
Regrettably, it works differently in Europe (and Lithuania in particular).
There’s a thing called “Opportunity passport” that works inside the country and EU Digital Covid-19 Certificate that works in the whole Union. They grant you certain rights over others, such as unrestricted travel.
In Lithuania, a bill has recently been passed that denies the non-vaccinated access to:
non-essential stores
stores, whose area is over 1500 sqm
beauty salons
library
small repair services > 15 mins of time
any indoors cultural / sports / celebration events
outdoors events > 500 people
As you see, those docs are pretty essential, and you won’t get them unless you comply.
Why do you want to avoid making your immune system do work?
Because a few immunologists suggested it is not a good thing to subject one’s immune system to unnecessary work.
There are other threats it might have to deal with, so I would like to avoid useless / distracting labor.
True. Have you been able to find any plausible justification for why mRNA vaccines make you that sick? From what I know, they only create the protein spikes.
I wonder if we haven’t observed adverse side effects due to small sample or the vaccine actually being better. How do we tell?
I don’t know when the first year was they they could have designed a successful vaccine against a novel virus in a day and a half, but the odds of that happening just before covid hit are obviously very low, especially since more recent trials and studies are showing that we can also quickly develop (better) vaccines against the flu and malaria, and the success with covid was not an unlikely outcome.
I did not get this part (maybe there’s a missed word or something. Are you implying that they had all tech in place to successfully manufacture such vaccines quickly?
So, to sum up:
mRNA has been studied and used (?) for about 30 years now
Moderna and BioNTech have been around for a while, and their past research has built up their scientific base.
Out of 18 mRNA vaccines developed around the world only 3 made it to clinical trials, and two made it to production
9 “old-school” vaccines made it through the trials
This does sound somewhat realistic: old tech is better-known and had more successful attempts at.
This essay of yours might be worth its own post :)
Your comment got me thinking about the probability of what I described once again:
There’s a vaccine for a previously unknown virus made with completely new technology … made in an astonishingly short time.
Such miracles only happen in people’s imagination.
Previously, I noticed one simple explanation: the vaccine is not as safe / effective.
Now I realize there’s another: the mRNA vaccines are not that new, they simply never made it public before. Just something that dawned on me.
I’ll study the links and get back here. Thank you for your time and effort!
Interesting information, thanks. However, the choice is as follows (numbers indicate available units):
1. Moderna (4990)
2. Comirnaty (Pfizer) (25111)
3. Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca) (6073)
4. Janssen (3611)The viral vector technology has previously been used for Ebola, right? What do we know about that?
UPD: apparently, we might get Novavax sometime soon. I might want to wait for that.
With all due respect, “learn how” is why I am here, it is in my very question.
I do have a job, and hence some experience outside my family bubble. However, at work I deal with scientists who are a very different kind of people as you might imagine.