How safe will you feel when vaccinated?

Because not fearing covid is not the same as denying that it exists.

All available data suggest that this virus is not something for a child my age to fear.

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But you not getting vaccinated and then getting Covid is something for an immune-compromised cancer patient, who can’t get vaccinated but wants to, to fear.

Eh, it’s not any different than French kissing a person, and while I’m not into my friends like that, I wouldn’t think it was gross to do that… just not a turn on. :woman_shrugging:

I mean if the friend has a cold or something then no. But otherwise, meh.

I do not deny this. But other than socially distanced outdoor drinking or putting every leaf in the dining room table and putting my parents at one end and me at the other, and Thanksgiving with my in-laws where we all got tested first, I haven’t really socialized with anyone in person in a year.

Yeah, the proximity of people eating at the movies is something I don’t like. At least in a restaurant you have more space.

I guess I wouldn’t squeeze into a spot at a crowded bar any more. I used to do that while waiting for a table.

Not so much with friends, but it’s been weird not sharing with my youngest kid since COVID (she works with the public and they (and her coworkers) don’t always wear masks :angry:). Instead of my teenager coming and asking if they can try a sip of whatever I’m having, it’s morphed into can I have one too? Most of the time the response is um, no, but occasionally she gets to have a small glass of wine or margarita, because those don’t require extra brain power to make more, I just take a little less.

does getting vaccinated protect other people or just yourself? I thought that the answer to that is unknown.

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I think it’s unknown if it’s possible for a vaccinated person to transmit Covid by breathing in an infected person’s exhalations, moving, and then breathing out those exhalations somewhere else where someone else breathes them in and contracts Covid.

But even if it’s possible, there’s going to be a lot less viral load floating around if we vaccinate as many people as we can.

And such an exhalation from a vaccinated person would certainly carry a lot less viral load than if the person was unvaccinated and Covid-positive.

So it certainly helps the cancer patient a lot, even if it doesn’t 100.00% guarantee they won’t catch Covid from your exhalations.

Even if they did, it would likely be a mild case due to the low viral load in such an exhalation.

BTW, my relative who’s going through chemo was told to get vaccinated. I don’t know if that’s true of all cancer patients or just some. But the doc made it sound like nearly all cancer patients should be getting vaccinated.

Possibly it depends on type of cancer or treatment, but that wasn’t the vibe I got from the doc.

My relative is stage 3, FWIW. So not exactly a mild case of cancer.

I think a lot of it has to do with the vaccines being mrna and not inactivated virus. Being “taught” to recognize the spike protein, rather than being exposed to the full virus, but dead, or in the nasal flu vaccine, live virus :grimacing:, is, I think, the difference in allowing immunocompromised people to get it.

oh, so we’re pretending you’re actually an 8 year old? i see.

Twig, you misunderstood this. The risk of physically carrying the virus you just inhaled is incosenquential, unless you just gave mouth-to-mouth the someone with an active infection or something.

What’s not known is how likely it is that vaccinated people achieve “sterilizing immunity”. People who develop sterilizing immunity to a disease kill the virus before it reproduces at all. But with many diseases you only develop non-sterilizing immunity, and you can still grow virus for a while, and transmit it, you don’t don’t grow enough of it to get sick yourself. That’s “carrying some virus in your respiratory system, that’s not enough to get YOU sick but might be enough to infect a more vulnerable person.”

Even if you only have non-sterilizing immunity, you still are likely to have a lower viral load than someone who has no immunity. And that makes you less contagious.

And of course, a small fraction of vaccinated people actually get sick, and they are contagious just like other people who get sick.

So it’s all a question of the odds. But in addition to the expectation that immunized people will be less contagious than people with naive immune systems, there’s now decent epidemiological evidence coming out of Israel and the UK that immunized people are, in fact, a lot less contagious.

In general, immunocompromised people can have vaccines made from dead virus, just not from weakened virus. (Or from inactived viruses that might not be completely completely dead.) But yeah, the mRNA vaccines should be fine. I’m not sure about the J&J vaccine, since that’s actually a live (but normally harmless) virus.

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Yap?

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After the vaccine sets in, I won’t be worried about myself at all. Heck, I’m not worried now, and I’m pretty far back in the line where I’m at. My zip code is under the goal infection rate by 25% (though I realize that can be nefariously manipulated by people not getting tested, but that would take some organizing).
I sat indoors at a restaurant just yesterday. It was cold outside for breakfast and there were no heaters. We stayed at a hotel on Saturday night.

I will still worry about others who have not yet been vaccinated (except those who refuse on unscientific grounds) but who might get COVID.
And (for a different reason), I worry about my friend, whose mom will soon be taken off a ventilator at the hospital, because if she recovers she’d be on the ventilator for the rest of her life. Because it’s sad.

i don’t stay in dog character in terms of whether i’m going to take a covid vaccine!

Anybody know how many cancer patients on chemo were included in the vaccine trials?

Maybe you should?

so both dog me and human me need the vaccine?

is that how measles spreads even though 99% of the population is vaccinated? And are you a doctor?

i’m planning on going out and licking every fire hydrant and mailbox i see

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