Tag: anti-vaxxers

Day 503 – Virus update and vaccination

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I’m on Day 22(?) of my nasty viral infection, so I thought I’d share an update.

I’m improving. This time last week, I was at the hospital for blood tests and x-rays. This time this week, I’m sitting at my computer with a beagle at my side, contemplating life (both of us).

Things are definitely getting better: fewer headaches, less coughing, resting heart rate dropping to near normal levels, fever is gone. Much to be happy about.

But it’s not all plain sailing. I’ve still got a few ongoing issues. Fatigue is the big one. The “chronic” sort: I struggle to stay up past 8 o’clock each evening – I’m just absolutely exhausted. And the “acute” sort: completing any sort of energetic (ha!) task – like climbing the stairs, moving a chair, doing some ironing, answering the door – leaves me light-headed, out of breath and needing a sit down. This bit doesn’t seem to be getting much better at the moment, which is equally frustrating and ridiculous. At this point, I’m not sure how I’m ever going to get back to my supreme, pre-Covid levels of athleticism. Jokes aside, I was happily doing about three 5km runs a week and playing 5-a-side football just a month ago and now I can’t walk 100m without a break.

I’m still not eating a lot. I have a limited appetite, perhaps partly because I cant smell or taste anything. Or can I? Bitterness is definitely there, maybe occasionally some saltiness. And if I eat anything spicy, I feel the burn, but with no actual flavour. Sometimes, I think I can taste proper flavours, but when I concentrate, maybe I’m only imagining what I know things taste(d) like. It’s just plain weird to lose something so very innate and basic that you – quite reasonably – take for granted. And texture becomes hugely important, which is why I can’t eat banana again until my taste completely returns. And possibly not even then.

And then there’s the mental stuff. Wow. Thinking and remembering stuff is really difficult. Concentrating for any length of time is pretty much impossible – a real effort. I’ve drifted off several times while writing this. I know that this might also be a symptom of just getting older, but it’s come on awfully quickly for me. Hopefully this “brain fog” clears sooner rather than later – it’s actually quite scary.

Other than that, though, I’m getting there. I’ve lost 6.5kg and a few weeks of my life, but I’m very glad to have avoided a stay in hospital and I’m very much looking forward to my second jab and even more protection in a few weeks.

If you’re hesitant about getting vaccinated, please take it from me: go and get jabbed – you don’t want this.

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I’m so very tired of the anti-vaxxers – I always have been – but I’m getting equally tired of those people on social media who tell us “I’m not anti-vax; I’m pro-choice”, and then fill their timelines with blatant anti-vax propaganda.
The stats are great for avoiding serious and disease through vaccination, but as I mentioned here, I would do anything to avoid even what I have had. Please take it from me, this was right up there with the worst I have ever felt, including Salmonella (enteritidis PT4, nogal), malaria, viral meningitis and (It’S jUsT lIkE) Influenza.

And you simply don’t know if it’s going to stop there. You could end up much sicker than I did. And then there are often ongoing symptoms that we’re still learning about: see here and here – and yes, of course we will be vaccinating our kids asap like we have with polio and TB and measles and mumps and chicken pox and HiB etc etc etc, because decent parents look after their offspring.

Anyway, brain fog rambling all done: if you want a personal account or if you have specific questions about how this can affect your life, maybe just to help push you into getting the jab, feel free to get in touch.
Spoiler: it’s zero fun (and I’m not just talking about my personal account).

Day 502 – Bits n pieces

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  • The Ashton Arch is due to be… er… “launched” into its final position on the 14-15th August. This has been a ridiculously big engineering project in a tiny town in the Western Cape and it seems to have been going on forever.

But this is it virtually finished. I don’t pass through there a lot, but I’ve only ever seen it not existing at all or completely buried in scaffolding:

IMG_2969 | new bridge, work in progress, ashton, western cap… | Flickr
ashton_montague_september_2019.jpg | Western Cape Government

This is a lot of scaffolding. Now all they need to do is move… er… “launch” the completed structure into the path of the actual road. Livestream above this weekend.

  • Cape Town will get drier and more extreme. And I’m not talking about our sense of humour:
  • And finally, ahead of our Fantasy Draft Night tomorrow evening, I was looking at my chosen team and thinking that it looked pretty much invincible. And then I realised that the other guys in the league get to choose some of the players as well, because that’s how a draft works. I’m suddenly far less confident.

Day 461 – Poor takes

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First off, I got a miserable 4/8 right on my Euro 2020 R16 predictions. That’s why I’m not a betting man. No-one could have foreseen France’s weird capitulation, Holland and Sweden’s decisive red cards and England’s… er… win.

It’s not for me to talk about what’s racist and what’s not, but I am completely happy to talk about how you can choose your sources to suit your narrative. So this tweet:

…might seem to make a very fair point until you look at the other UK newspaper front pages this morning and note that the good doc has only chosen the to share the ones that don’t feature Raheem Sterling. Like ignoring the front page of The Sun. Which is usually a very good idea, fair enough, but not for his reasons.

Or The Times:

Even the FT (That’s Financial, not Football) got overlooked:

But while we’re on the subject of poor takes, did England really win? Or is it all part of the “experimental vaccine” plot? Which doesn’t exist, but if it did, was England’s “win” actually just to keep our minds off it?
Sarah Plumley BA PGCE thinks so:

To which the all-knowing Dj42(74404412) sagely replies:

Seems legit, and will surely be proven true when we crash out at the hands of Ukraine at the weekend (not an official prediction) and suddenly realise that we’re now 5g-nanobot chipped, somewhat magnetic, DNA-manipulated, mind-controlled mutant zombies.

Or just a bit less vulnerable to Coronavirus infection. One of the two, anyway.

And not me, anyway, because I won’t see a vaccine for many months yet, thanks to SA’s disastrous vaccine rollout (see 6000 miles… passim).

Sarah’s tweets are a veritable smorgasbord (have you ever known of a smorgasbord that wasn’t veritable?) of Thin Aluminium Millinery: Epstein, Big Pharma, IVM, Trump, “Sheeple” every second post.
It’s amusing to watch her calling other people “brainwashed”.

You could argue that maybe I’m just choosing the tweets that suit my narrative.
However, in Sarah’s case, there weren’t any others available.

Day 377 – Wizard Poison

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I spotted this on Twitter and it made me smile.

“Wizard poison” – what a lovely turn of phrase.

The latest anti-vaxxer (for it is they that Patton is referring to under his “idiots” tag) arguments demonstrate a couple of their usual methods very nicely. I thought I’d run through them.

Firstly, there’s their claim that the vaccines amount to “gene therapy”. Nope.
What they’ve done here is looked at the vaccine, seen the acronym “mRNA”, extrapolated the N and the A to give themselves the phrase “nucleic acid” which they then associate with genes (even though genes are actually made up of DNA, not RNA) and then somehow leapt to the assumption that the vaccine will in some way replace the genes within their and your DNA, thus altering their and your genetic code. wut?
This is plainly incorrect, but – as we’ve discussed many times on here and everywhere else – that simple fact will not stop the rumours from being spread far and wide across the internet.
There’s a further point to this as well, though: the suggestion the gene therapy is a bad thing. Not so. Gene therapy will save countless lives, but that’s very much a secondary issue here, because none of the Covid-19 vaccines are gene therapy.

So that’s the one tactic: getting things completely wrong without any care or repercussion. The second one is cherry-picking the data to suit their narrative.

There may be a problem with the AZ vaccine in that there seems to be a link between it and instances of blood clots in patients. That’s clearly not a good thing, and because of that, the anti-vaxxer brigade have joyfully leapt all over it.

The thing is that we’re looking at 30 suspected cases in the UK, after 18 million doses of the vaccine in question. That amounts to 1 case for every 600,000 doses administered. Those are the numbers, and that’s what’s prompted a full investigation.

However…

Blood clots are also a side-effect of Covid-19, possibly by triggering an autoimmune antibody. The instance of this is approximately 1 in 6,000 cases (nice number). So while you might – possibly – suffer from blood clots as a result of having the AZ vaccine, if you get Covid-19 as a result of not having the AZ vaccine, you’re about 100 times more likely to have problems with blood clots.

Surprise surprise, this is the bit that the anti-vaxxers choose to omit from their shitty monologues.

You can’t believe everything you hear. Or indeed anything that comes from their mouths.

Take it from me: the vaccines are far safer than running the risk of getting Covid, which is very much not safe.
And they contain very, very little wizard poison. Promise.

Respiratory illness

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Your daily reminder that as it stands, Influenza is far more likely to infect and kill you than 2019-nCoV: the all-singing, all-dancing new virus coming straight out of Wuhan.

Fortunately, there’s something you can do about influenza – vaccinate yourself and your kids. If you do it in SA, you’ll pay about R50 and if you have medical insurance, you’ll pay nothing and they’ll give you a million points for doing it.

I lived with, cared for and slept next to a very sick wife with influenza for 10 days last year and remained wholly unscarthed (by the virus, at least). Guess who’d had the vaccine and who hadn’t?
We’re both going to get it this year, and so should you. And your family.

And if anyone tells you not to – they’re no friend of yours. Why on earth would you wish a serious and wholly preventable disease upon anyone, let alone a friend?

So yes, avoid these sort of people and this sort of shit:

Full story here. Sample paragraph here:

One recent post came from the mother of a 4-year-old Colorado boy who died from the flu this week. In it, she consulted group members while noting that she had declined to fill a prescription written by a doctor.
The mother also wrote that the “natural cures” she was treating all four of her children with — including peppermint oil, Vitamin C and lavender — were not working and asked the group for more advice. The advice that came in the comments included breastmilk, thyme and elderberry, none of which are medically recommended treatments for the flu.

We’re all (rightly) concerned about the influence of social media and fake news in elections around the world, but there are other (literally life and death) situations where less effort seems to be being made to halt the tide of disinformation reaching (clearly) vulnerable parents.

This needs to be addressed, and quickly.

UPDATE: We have a problem.