How's everyone holding up?

[Jed Cooper]

Happy Birthday! 🎈🎁🎊🎉🎂


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[Aline]

Hey, Jed! Obrigada!

[Jed Cooper]

De nada 🙂


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[The Schofield Kid]

Happy belated birthday Aline.

Hope you had a great day!! 😎😎

[AKA23]

Happy Birthday, Aline. Those are some nice photos. Looks like you had fun!

[Aline]

Thank you, SK!

Thank you, AKA! Yes, it was great fun, it had been a whole year without seeing my friends

[Gant]

Happy Birthday Aline... hope you had a f@ntastic day.. great pics too..

and 50 ain?t so bad 😉🍻

[Aline]

Thank you, Gant!

That's right, it is just a number. Look at Clint in his 90s and still kicking!

[Gant]

The best is yet to come 😊

[The Schofield Kid]

Had my first Pfizer vaccine jab today. Second one will be in 3 weeks. We?re in lockdown here again after a spike in cases. It?s been two weeks although up until last Friday most people kept going about their business and didn?t take it seriously.

Because of that, lockdown will probably last until the end of the month at the earliest.

[Gant]

I?ve had both jabs... were set to come out of lockdown next week. Some people think that?s good and others not.
Infection rate is going up but hospitalisation still manageable... we?ll see I guess..

[Christopher]

Pretty much all restrictions are lifted where I am, but there is some concern for the new covid variant that's going around.

[The Schofield Kid]

Are there a lot of anti vaccine people in the u.s and Europe? We seem to have a lot here in Australia. It baffles me with some of their claims about vaccines.

[Matt]

Yes. It's surprising that this pandemic had to become so political. Trump probably would have won re-election if not for COVID. Biden won just by hiding out and wearing a mask when he went out in public. When you have as much political hostility as we have now in the U.S., and the politicians and press divide the masses between the "good" and the "bad" depending on if you get vaccinated or wear masks, there's going to be resistance. Then you have Biden out there saying people on Facebook are "killing people" for even just discussing side effects from the (non-FDA approved) vaccine.

I got the vaccine as soon as I was able. I completely understand anyone not wanting to take it. I don't worry about them, because I'm vaccinated. At least for now, what we hear is vaccinated CAN get COVID, but it's mild, and people aren't dying or being admitted to the hospital. So if everyone who wants the vaccine gets it, they shouldn't worry about who isn't vaccinated. Then maybe when all this ridiculous political BS dies down a bit, hold-outs will get the vaccine too.

[AKA23]

It is tragic that the vaccine has become so politicized. I agree with Matt on that. In my opinion, however, concern about vaccine side effects for most people is tremendously misguided. The perceived harms are wildly out of proportion to the actual observable, proven harms. I've never fully understood the huge vaccine hesitancy movement in general, separate and apart from COVID vaccination. It seems like the concerns for most people are not really founded on evidence. You are orders of magnitude more likely to die of a hospital acquired infection such as MRSA than you are of a vaccine. That is among the top ten leading causes of death in the US in some of the studied years. People die every single year from complications from routine surgeries, but few people choose not to get routine surgery that is recommended by their doctor due to concerns about complications. You are much more likely to be hospitalized for internal bleeding from taking aspirin than the vanishingly small number of people who suffered complications due to inflammation resulting in hospitalization or death caused by a vaccine. A few hundred young women had blood clot complications out of many millions given the JJ vaccine, which may or may not have been caused by the vaccine. But do you know what causes a much higher risk of blot clots in women? Birth control pills. There are many more blood clots that are caused by women taking birth control every year than in people who took the vaccine yet almost everyone still uses birth control. In every medication, there is a little poison. With every procedure, there is risk of something going wrong. What matters is comparing the likelihood of benefit to the presence of the risk. That's how medicine functions, and it always will. There will never be a 100% safe vaccine or medication. There will always be a remote possibility that some may be harmed by any vaccine, or any medication, but the very people that are often irrationally worried about the vaccine side effects are often the very same people who would be at much greater risk from severe complications from COVID or even death that the vaccine would protect them against. Pfizer and Moderna appear to be even safer than JJ, and more effective.

Also, it's simply not true that we don't need to worry about the unvaccinated because if everyone who wants the vaccine got it, then the society would be protected. We cannot reach herd immunity with 30-40% of the population not getting vaccinated, and in some areas, vaccination rates are much lower than that. We will need more of the unvaccinated to become vaccinated for us to have a realistic possibility of societal protection from COVID, and with travel resuming eventually, if we don't have consistent levels of vaccination worldwide, the US will be at risk of a resurgence or a mutation of COVID that may be resistant to the vaccines. The biggest mistake the Biden administration made is not requiring proof of vaccination or a vaccine passport as a condition to remove masks indoors. Since there is no way to verify, one of the reasons that COVID is growing is because many of the unvaccinated are choosing not to wear masks and pretending they have been vaccinated because there's no way to determine who has been vaccinated and who has not been. That never made any sense from the standpoint of public health.

[Gant]

I got the vaccine.. Pretty much all restrictions are lifted here and tonight I play my first proper indoor concert
since March 2020?.

I know someone who worked closely on the vaccination for over a year and a close family member has worked
on a Covid hospital ward this past year.. I didn?t hesitate in getting the jab. 

[Matt]

I will always support people's health decisions being free of government intervention. This includes assisted suicide, abortions, and vaccinations. Everyone should make their own health decisions for their own body. Period.

[AKA23]

I will always support people's health decisions being free of government intervention. This includes assisted suicide, abortions, and vaccinations. Everyone should make their own health decisions for their own body. Period.

Whether the vaccine should be mandated or whether people should retain the freedom to choose to get it or not is a worthwhile and thought provoking discussion to have, but it?s not what I?m talking about. My main thesis is that many of the unvaccinated seem to be disproportionately worried about what is likely to be a lower risk treatment that for almost everyone will pose no actual threat, while most people are much less concerned, based on their behavior, about medical choices that are statistically much more likely to harm them and which pose a much greater risk to their health. As someone who did get vaccinated, do you agree or disagree with that, Matt? What does everyone else think? I?d love to hear more perspectives on this.

[Matt]

I don't really agree. A lot of people who aren't getting vaccinations have already had COVID. Their natural immune system is giving them the protections that the vaccine would, but the vaccine is more likely to cause them to be very ill than those who haven't been vaccinated. So trying to shame/force these people to get vaccinated so they can fly, work, etc., is ridiculous.

I watched Matt Damon's video yesterday, and find it ridiculous. So he has friends who are immunocompromised and can't get the vaccine, therefore, hae wants everyone else to get vaccinated so we reach herd immunity. Welllll.... a lot of the people who aren't getting vaccinated also have good health-related reasons not to. I have a good friend who is older, in her 70's, and due to extreme allergies cannot take any of the 3. I did discuss J&J with her, thinking it would be safer, but her doctor told her to not even risk that.

This conversation is ridiculous. Let everyone make their own health decisions. If you're vaccinated, you're safe from a serious case of COVID. I don't see why anyone is worried if they're already vaccinated.

[The Schofield Kid]

What?s been the situation in the rest of the world when you get out of lockdown, If you?re not fully vaccinated are you denied entry to pubs, clubs, restaurants etc? We?re due to come out of lockdown in mid October with full vaccination at 70%. Just curious if there?s been lawsuits by people not vaccinated if they?ve been denied entry to a venue?