Nursing has a sizeable crowd of mid level marketing, "alternative medicine" and other such frauds. Doctors of course do too because it can be big money to have your doctorate attached to it.
We need to remove these people from operating in public care but unions and friends don't currently care.
I don't think nurses have much (any) training in biotech.
An MD might have a 4-year undergrad in biochemistry or molecular biology or something, an internship at a biotech company or time in a research lab, they might be on one or two wetlab publications, they have another 4 years of medical training with lab experience for the MD, and another 3 or more years in residency training.
I believe most nurses have only an associates (2-year), or a 4-year undergrad degree with zero lab experience, zero biotech industry experience, and zero research-focused biochemistry/molecular biology/immunology training. They're not out there running ELISAs, Western Blots, minipreps and passaging cell cultures.
So they may not understand how the vaccine technology works at a particularly higher level than the general public.
Not a slight against nurses, of course, they do incredibly valuable work. But, upon hearing about a novel mRNA-based vaccine technology, they may be less likely than, say, an MD or a biomedical PhD to go 'that's a pretty cool application of a technology I understand pretty well."
Same thing with cops, fire, paramedics etc. They didn't exactly spend a decade in school to learn all about the magic of B cells and epitopes. So, they might be a little suspicious of something they're not exactly trained to understand, and seemingly not particularly curious about. Not really their fault I guess, it's just way outside of their wheelhouse.
In this particular situation, however, that becomes a bit of a problem since the public isn't necessarily able to contextualize their opinion on something, and may miss the fact that they may have zero clue what they're talking about.
That was centuries ago in covid time. I doubt cuomo is saying anything like that now. And Fauci and all other relevant experts have agreed with the fda approval.
Whether September was “centuries ago in COVID time” or not, the public remembers this sort of thing, especially when it comes to perceived personal danger.
It was an irresponsible position for Gov. Cuomo to take, even if he only took it briefly.
Was it? Trump threatened the head of the FDA with firing if he didn't approve the vaccine immediately. Luckily, I don't see any evidence that he aquiesed.
Essential personnel not wanting the vaccine isn't the problem.
The problem is that everyone who wants it can't get it until essential personnel has been given several chances. Nearly 30+ million doses are sitting on a shelf because they're only offering it to healthcare and first responders, and the demand isn't meeting supply. But demand from older adults (60years +) is very high, but can't get it for another month or two.
This exactly. I'm even in favor of saying "ok, you had your chance to get the vax, we got 200 doses left. Give em to the first 200 people in line." I hate to say it, but it's almost got to be run with a little more chaos. Almost like how I would envision how decisions in wartime with scarce resources and a time crunch would be made. At a certain point, it doesn't matter who's arms its going into, it just needs to get into peoples arms, and asap. period.
It's disgusting that there's vaccine sitting in freezers. Just start giving it to anyone who wants one. I've seen videos of debates where they sit around and discuss which "vulnerable" group should get it first. (Even though many simulations suggest people who are more likely to travel and interact should get it first to optimize the slowing of the spread.)
Exactly. I question if this sort of strictly tiered approach is really the best. We're all gonna have to get it in the end, so why not err on the side of higher throughput?
I'd happily queue early (and do a volunteer shift) to get a dose from one of these people taking a pass....
I believe in CA, they have issued rule change instructing outlets with the vaccine to move down the tier levels if there is more vaccine than demand in the current official tier.
Unfortunately, this will need adoption and communication in all states separately since federal direction on these matters is lacking.
I was recently speaking with a medical friend of mine who spends a lot of her time reviewing clinical trials. She had an interesting perspective that made me rethink my attitude.
She didn't go into details, but she feels that the usual safeguards have been bypassed in an unprecedented manner when approving the covid vaccine, which in any normal situation would be considered completely unethical by the medical community.
She noted that this is an extraordinary situation and rushed approval was almost certainly the right move, but cautioned against judging anyone who refuses to get the vaccine and simply dismissing them as antivaxers. They have reason to be uncertain.
I think there's a great deal of misunderstanding about what the processes that go into vaccine trials are. I've seen people talk about all this long-term post-trial monitoring that is getting skipped and then have people who've actually run studies comment and say that's not something they've ever done.
Honestly, people skipping the vaccine don't really "matter" in the near term. We have more than enough people willing to get the vaccine for many, many months, so if people want to risk reaching immunity the hard way that's their choice.
> actually run studies comment and say that's not something they've ever done.
I mean, if that's true, that's really disappointing. Though I find it hard to believe, as I've seen examples of medical papers written from long-term post-vax surveillance. For instance this one from the WHO, finding that they could prevent the deaths of about 500,000 more young girls per year in Africa alone by using a different, more effective, measles vaccine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4052142/
I particularly like that example as it shows what's at stake: literally millions of lives are saved by vaccinations. Screwing up that with hasty approvals, and misleading the public about how much safety data we have, could lead to literally millions of additional deaths in the future if vaccination rates go down. Health authorities should be thinking about the long term, not just getting through the covid crisis.
Re: nurses specifically, the trials simply didn't enroll people who had already had COVID-19, so they just don't have data on how safe that is. It probably is. But we just don't know yet. There's also little reason to get the vaccine in that case as we're now very confident that immunity after infection is effective and long lasting. Obviously, being exposed to it, many nurses would have been infected already and recovered; if I knew I had been infected already, I would not get vaccinated.
They performed massive trials, what a lot of people are doing is conflating time to develop a vaccine with time to do trials.
The trials were not abbreviated, they weren't below usual sample sizes.
The only difference is the development time for the vaccine, which is only abbreviated due to the massive advance in development time that new mRNA techniques give us.
The Pfizer trial had about 20,000 people in each arm. That's just not enough data to detect rare side effects at a rate anywhere near high enough to know that the vaccine is safer than covid itself for younger/healthier populations who aren't at risk. For the young, healthy, 0 to 19 age range the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 1 in 2.5 million: https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/9/e003094
Normally that wouldn't be a big problem, as vaccines are usually rolled out relatively slowly, so population wide monitoring should pick up on any issues. But countries are aiming to vaccinate as close to 100% as they can get within a matter of months.
>An American Nurses Association survey of 13,000 registered nurses showed 34% said they would take a COVID-19 vaccine, with 36% saying they would not and the rest saying they weren’t sure
I wonder if the number wanting to say "no" is higher, and people just selected "unsure" in case there were repercussions for saying a straight "no"
Third-hand knowledge, but a neighbor who is an ER doctor is always complaining that many nurses do not take PPE and Covid seriously despite seeing hundreds of seriously ill people this past year.
Presumably, the vast majority of the nurses working now have either already contracted and recovered from COVID, and are now likely immune, or gone through months of heavy exposure without consequence. I’m not particularly surprised they aren’t taking it as seriously as we may expect at this point.
I was pretty shocked to start poking around and see that most frontline COVID workers have not contracted the virus yet. I even saw a study that indicated that nurses were more likely to have contracted the virus through social contact outside of work than through contact at work. Apparently PPE is really working well.
It also probably helps that by the time patients are hospitalized they're likely past their most contagious point.
My partner and I happened to be at the hospital around April time frame, and even though they had PPE-adorned people at the entrance taking temperatures and logging data, I was surprised how many nurses were not wearing masks, and indeed neither did our doctor. May have changed since then, but it felt like peak panic (of the unknown) was strongest in my area closer to the initial outbreak. While more people wear masks now, my perception is that there is far less concern about COVID. I'm curious what is responsible for that - fatigue, fatalism, survivor's recklessness?
I expect fatigue might be a big part of it. Regular people are feeling it, and health care workers are not immune to it.
Having said that, I've been going to a hospital twice a week for the past few months for allergy shots, and everyone is strictly masked and distanced. Two examples of strictness details: nurses will open and close doors for me so I don't have to touch them. And once they had me take an allergy medication before getting my shot, and the nurse actually left the room while I had my mask off taking the pill.
Having said that, I go running in my neighborhood, usually through part of the campus of a (different) hospital. I regularly see people in scrubs with hospital IDs walking to the parking lot (within a few feet of me if I didn't avoid them) with their masks pulled down off their faces.
Hospitals in my area enforcing higher levels of PPE are having problems with staffing because of PPE fatigue and staff don’t get sick less then hospitals with less PPE.
In 2020, COVID-19 was the 3rd leading cause of death in the United Staes - behind heart disease and cancer. It's the only cause of death in the top 5 that's transmissible from person to person.
People watch what they eat to avoid heart disease and wear seatbelts to prevent dying in car accidents. Why not wear PPE to prevent COVID-19?
This one is rough. I suppose nurse's have a legal right not to get vaccinated, but because they are going to be in contact with at-risk populations and are exponentially more likely to encounter sick people, I figure hospitals have a right not to employee those nurse's for a while (unless they already have antibodies), and patients should have a right to know too.
Do you think it will be legal for any employer to force leave (or dismissal) if a person refuses to take the vaccine?
.. that sounds like a dangerous road to go down.
Australia has tried to "force" vaccines for years - if kids are vaccinated the parents get worse tax breaks, kids can't goto daycare or elementary school, etc. but AFAIK it's not a "legal" requirement, and nobody can be terminated from employment.
Aside from the legal/ethical implications a sibling outlined, I just kinda think it mostly doesn't matter that much.
People who have been vaccinated themselves will not care if the police they have to interact with are vaccinated or not (well, 95%ish not care).
People who have not been vaccinated should err on the side of assuming anyone they come in contact with is not vaccinated (and is possibly infected) anyway, and should take precautions.
No, that's not perfect, because precautions can still fail to work, but it's not absolutely the worst either.
On the flip side, I don't think it would be unreasonable to have police (etc.) who refuse the vaccine temporarily reassigned to roles that limit their interaction with the public.
