Paid to give shots—yes. Does that equal profit? Not necessarily. There were mass vaccination clinics which had a lot of volunteers, other places had to hire/contract additional staff to administer vaccines. However, I would expect in most cases that giving vaccines generates profit for more than pharmaceutical companies and the actual person giving the shot (if not a volunteer).
Reimbursed more for covid patients—yes. They also required more PPE to care for when both demand surged and supply chains were choked. Brown paper bags can still be triggering to those who lived through that rationing phase. (Anecdotally, we have 100-200 N95 masks at home out of fear of a repeat situation.) Even with extra reimbursement, covid patients weren’t necessarily profitable. Note that a lot of healthcare professionals left the field during covid, and it wasn’t because of a money-grabbing windfall leading to early retirement.
Not sure about how there’s profit in coding a death as covid. Do funeral homes charge more?
I get that you personally don’t think vaccination is for you. I also get that you think the risk of vaccination is higher than what others think the risk to be. However, it’s insulting to broadly paint the healthcare industry as excitedly capitalizing on this great new revenue stream. These kind of sentiments can contribute to people leaving the healthcare field. It’s a challenging enough field without making everyone out to be Big Pharma minions.
Don’t need to respond to this, as I am likely stepping away from this thread.
There was some incentive for families to have the deaths classified as COVID IIrC as there was some federal money available to help with funeral costs if the death was COVID related at one point but I don’t know that hospitals were incentivized to classify illnesses/death as COVID
Thanks, I’d forgotten about this. Not sure families had influence on how the death was classified tho. Even if there was some influence, it was a kindness vs profit situation, assuming not fraud (meaning a with vs from covid situation, not saying it was covid if the decedent didn’t have covid). It’s not like they were getting a kickback from families or Big Coffin.
Not much. A doctor fills out the death certificate. I suppose you can ask them to add or subtract causes, but they shouldn’t.
My mom’s death certificate listed about 6 causes. The primary cause was covid, but there were a lot of contributory causes. (Her immune disorder, her kidney disease…) I think the average is 2, because a lot of deaths have various issues contributing to them.
Unclear given you provided no evidence thereof. Plenty of workers doing their jobs have been attacked as if they were policy makers, but perhaps you are unaware of that.
Like doctors who were fired and lost their license for successfully treating patients outside the one size fits all protocols? Protocols established by people who were not actually successfully treating covid patients.
Like the covid recovered nurses who were fired because they didn’t want shots that provided no additional benefit?
I do not doubt that in your mind, you are distinguishing between these two groups.
And any formulation of risk in public health, especially communications to a general audience, will inevitably be an exercise in power. That power will be political, though not necessarily partisan. And it will be in addition to any objective interpretation of the evidence behind that formulation of risk.
However, this is how your claims sound to my ears. You seem to be talking about a failure between the matching of risk and evidence that is so profound in some cases that it cannot possibly be limited to policymakers only, at least in my imagination. For example, suppose the vaccines are more dangerous than covid because they are based on new technology. Much of this information is public, in particular the underlying technology, data on their efficacy, and data on the dangers of covid. Again in my imagination, at least, so many experts would have had to remain quiet on the vaccine issue for your story to be true that it would represent a fundamentally undermining of the entire medical community’s commitment to both truth and health.
My guess is that it doesn’t look that way in your imagination. But I understand JFG’s perspective, and don’t think your response takes it seriously.
While i think the CDC was wrong to take so very long to acknowledge that someone who survived covid and recovered had immunity as good as someone who was vaccinated, i also think that medical professionals who care for vulnerable people and also are exposed to all manner of diseases have a much higher responsibility to take precautions than the rest of us. And nurses shouldn’t be overruling the CDC, that’s not their role.
I have zero sympathy for nurses who refused to be vaccinated. And while I’m not specifically concerned with anyone’s covid vaccination status today, I’d still be shy of being treated by a nurse who refused to get vaccinated when that was the standard. What other medical standards is this nurse ignoring?
(Fun fact: until covid started to mutate, the vaccine actually provided slightly better sterilizing immunity than infection did. But experts were predicting the virus would evolve to evade the vaccine before the vaccine was approved. And infection provided slightly more “general” immunity. So those who successfully recovered from one covid were slightly better equipped to fight the variants. Anyway, most countries treated recovery from covid similar to vaccination from early on.)
I don’t disagree there were people fired over vaccine refusal. While the covid vaccines were new, this isn’t new policy wrt other vaccines including ones which may or may not have strong efficacy (e.g. flu vaccine).
I recently saw uproar over a nurse out there telling parents to refuse Vitamin K shots for their newborns, preying on fear that it can’t be undone, rely on the kid’s natural body systems, etc. Is that reckless? Yep. Does that represent the majority of healthcare. No. Should her spreading that type of information be a fireable offense? I think so.
I’d be interested in your sources for the doctors who lost their licenses for effective covid treatment. I don’t doubt there were doctors who were fired. I’m interested in the details. I couldn’t keep up with the grifting during that time.
It’s easy to armchair years later but I think a lot of people have forgotten how awful that initial phase was.
Police your language? All of them.
Refrain from criticizing? None of them.
It seems many aspects of the COVID response strike a raw nerve for you. Clearly some of your comments strike a raw nerve for me. I suspect we saw things unroll from very different perspectives. Maybe you dismiss my comments as reactionary. Maybe that’s fair. But maybe you should consider what’s going to move things forward. I didn’t invite an audience to this discussion.
I assume there was a lot of trial and error in treatments very early on as it was a new virus and doctors had few weapons other than standard respiratory care for sick patients. I’m sure there were a number of doctors that happened to “treat” a number of sick patients with an above average recovery rate, but as actuaries, we should understand than the existence of these results can happen in small subsets of data across the millions of people who were catching the virus.
Now how should medicine approach these results? If there is a logic relation between the treatment and results, hopefully it is further researched, and quickly. Drugs that fight parasites don’t seem like logical first choices, at least compared to known antiviral drugs. Consider the statistical significance of results. Move on if it’s garbage, you are wasting time and potential lives. The success was just an illusion. Promoting junk treatment when people are desperate is not good medicine. All it does is further junk medicine.
Ivermectin was moderately helpful against covid in places where people routinely have parasites. Maybe it’s harder to fight parasite and covid at the same time.
Similarly, vitamin D was moderately effective against covid in places where vitamin D deficiency is common. Your immune system needs a certain level of vitamin D to function, and many urban people don’t get that much vitamin D.
Caveat: I am a firm believer that the development and heavy use of the Covid vaccine in 2021 was the correct policy. I had the initial shots as well as a booster around the omicron wave. But I will not take another Covid vaccine unless there is another massive outbreak or my personal risk factors significantly increase. I personally do not receive the flu vaccine but I agree in general with the pediatric schedule of vaccines though I have discussed/questioned this with various pediatricians and slightly deviated from it. It is the “practice” of medicine, and there is often not a consensus among the medical community. However, doctors do know a hell of a lot more than the average person who thinks they know more because of the internet.
It is clear to me that excess mortality during 2020 and 2021 exceeded official Covid death counts. This is after factoring in elevated mental health-related deaths. I do believe politics played a role in attributing a cause of death as Covid; some wished to minimize the number while others wished to maximize it.
Your 2nd point is also true. However I cannot conclude that the vaccine reduced deaths, and I recognize you have not stated this. As you mentioned, geographic areas that believed in the vaccine also believed in other mitigation efforts. As an example, going to school virtually must have reduced Covid deaths, whether vaccinated or not. I also believe that masks, along with common sense social distancing had positive effects on the transmission of Covid.
I was frustrated with areas that went overboard with restrictions and rules, but I was similarly frustrated with areas where many people showed disregard for rules or the concern of others.
I think it did by quite a bit. There was a large share of the population (half or more) that avoided covid during 2020 and benefitted from the protection the vaccine offered.
Nursing home infections were a big driver of deaths, in not sure how many of those were prevented, so maybe vaccines didn’t save 1.2m lives, but i think it would be a fair number approaching that.
Yeah, when I think about it, I do think the vaccine did prevent many deaths, but a large share of those getting vaccinated also participated in other Covid-prevention measures. It is impossible to determine the vaccine’s impact, but I think the “saved lives” estimates are overstated as fortunately mutations weakened the virus.
From another perspective, the vaccine “caused” a large number of Covid deaths by integrating a large % of the population back into “normal” society where they caught Covid. The mental health impacts of the vaccine development and delivery were very high. And I denounce statements that the vaccine itself caused a significant amount of deaths.
I guess my assumption is that everyone would eventually go back to normal life, and everyone would eventually catch COVID. I’m glad vaccines only took a year to become available.
I haven’t read much that mutated strains are less dangerous, i stopped paying close attention one i caught covid about two years ago. Seems like something that could be difficult to measure once the population has immunity through vaccine or infection, but also the expected result of virus evolution to become more infectious and less deadly. Certainly a reasonable point though.