temporaryreality; here's another installment of IM Doc for your archive.
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IM Doc January 9, 2023 at 3:01 pm About the herd immunity article —– I apologize – I am on a work laptop today and I do not type well on laptops. I hope there are not a lot of errors. I have said this before in the comments, and I will say it again. This is likely to be the last time. I am not interested in being a broken record. When one is in medical training, one realizes that the TEXTBOOKS of medicine are the repository of the stored wisdom of the ages. When things change or are found to be different as time goes on, the textbooks change as well, but very slowly. So, as a physician, you are trained to look at textbooks for the stored knowledge of whatever issue you are questioning. Good textbooks are not “UpToDate” no matter how much the medical corporations would like us to run on algorithms. Also not Twitter, not last week’s journals, but the textbooks. Every time I have ever read about coronaviruses or other families of rapidly mutating, highly contagious RNA viruses, ie influenza, it specifically states in the first few paragraphs of these textbooks that there is NO SUCH THING AS HERD IMMUNITY in these situations. There is population immunity that develops over time that is much different than the herd immunity we are used to in things like measles. Measles outbreaks are uncommon and very limited because there is a level of “herd immunity”. Coronavirus OC43 and Influenza cause people to be sick over and over, even if you had them 6 months or a year ago. MEASLES vs OC43 ARE TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS. I therefore realized early on in the pandemic that this was going to be the case. I have commented about this repeatedly. It is not because I am any smarter – it is because I was trained to look at the sources and to value each source for different kinds of wisdom. The fact that on all sides this “herd immunity” fallacy has been continually spewn about COVID by people who know better has been very depressing for me. Our species and this virus will eventually learn to live with one another. It has happened many many times throughout history – and please realize, if this were not the natural course of events, WE WOULD NOT BE HERE. This has all happened before, and will all happen again. This species has survived through them all. Whether the rapprochement is years or decades or longer, is not known. When these pandemics come to the world, you can view them as a hot war – with casualties on both sides. Eventually, the hot war will become an eternal cold war. Our species and this virus will live together. We are not there yet. As I have also stated repeatedly, introducing a NON-STERILIZING vaccine into an acute pandemic like this, pre-rapprochement, has never been done in the history of human medicine on a global scale. We vaccinate all the time now in the “cold war” period – like the flu. When the “acute pandemic” program has been done in animal models, either the vaccine was withdrawn when discovered to be non-sterilizing OR unfortunate things happened to a limited number of subjects. But to administer a non-sterilizing vaccine in a highly mutable and contagious global acute pandemic to this many subjects has never been done before. You are living through the greatest experiment ever conducted in medicine. It is too late to go back now. We are just going to have to see what happens. Being armed with this information – it is imperative that you arm your body the best way we can until the cold war time is reached. When that will be, I do not know. I go over this repeatedly every day with my patients – EAT WELL. EXERCISE. DON’T SMOKE. GET OUT IN THE SUN. LOSE WEIGHT. GET YOUR A1c DOWN. SMILE. DE-STRESS. HUG YOUR KIDS. CHECK ON YOUR NEIGHBORS.
More IM Doc
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IM Doc
January 9, 2023 at 3:01 pm
About the herd immunity article —–
I apologize – I am on a work laptop today and I do not type well on laptops. I hope there are not a lot of errors.
I have said this before in the comments, and I will say it again. This is likely to be the last time. I am not interested in being a broken record.
When one is in medical training, one realizes that the TEXTBOOKS of medicine are the repository of the stored wisdom of the ages. When things change or are found to be different as time goes on, the textbooks change as well, but very slowly. So, as a physician, you are trained to look at textbooks for the stored knowledge of whatever issue you are questioning. Good textbooks are not “UpToDate” no matter how much the medical corporations would like us to run on algorithms. Also not Twitter, not last week’s journals, but the textbooks. Every time I have ever read about coronaviruses or other families of rapidly mutating, highly contagious RNA viruses, ie influenza, it specifically states in the first few paragraphs of these textbooks that there is NO SUCH THING AS HERD IMMUNITY in these situations. There is population immunity that develops over time that is much different than the herd immunity we are used to in things like measles. Measles outbreaks are uncommon and very limited because there is a level of “herd immunity”. Coronavirus OC43 and Influenza cause people to be sick over and over, even if you had them 6 months or a year ago. MEASLES vs OC43 ARE TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS.
I therefore realized early on in the pandemic that this was going to be the case. I have commented about this repeatedly. It is not because I am any smarter – it is because I was trained to look at the sources and to value each source for different kinds of wisdom. The fact that on all sides this “herd immunity” fallacy has been continually spewn about COVID by people who know better has been very depressing for me.
Our species and this virus will eventually learn to live with one another. It has happened many many times throughout history – and please realize, if this were not the natural course of events, WE WOULD NOT BE HERE. This has all happened before, and will all happen again. This species has survived through them all. Whether the rapprochement is years or decades or longer, is not known. When these pandemics come to the world, you can view them as a hot war – with casualties on both sides. Eventually, the hot war will become an eternal cold war. Our species and this virus will live together. We are not there yet.
As I have also stated repeatedly, introducing a NON-STERILIZING vaccine into an acute pandemic like this, pre-rapprochement, has never been done in the history of human medicine on a global scale. We vaccinate all the time now in the “cold war” period – like the flu. When the “acute pandemic” program has been done in animal models, either the vaccine was withdrawn when discovered to be non-sterilizing OR unfortunate things happened to a limited number of subjects. But to administer a non-sterilizing vaccine in a highly mutable and contagious global acute pandemic to this many subjects has never been done before. You are living through the greatest experiment ever conducted in medicine. It is too late to go back now. We are just going to have to see what happens.
Being armed with this information – it is imperative that you arm your body the best way we can until the cold war time is reached. When that will be, I do not know. I go over this repeatedly every day with my patients – EAT WELL. EXERCISE. DON’T SMOKE. GET OUT IN THE SUN. LOSE WEIGHT. GET YOUR A1c DOWN. SMILE. DE-STRESS. HUG YOUR KIDS. CHECK ON YOUR NEIGHBORS.