Do you still stand by this?

The good old "Think of the children" argument again... This is an attack on online privacy, again. I hate it.

It is the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe. We don't ban knives either just because a child could accidentally get hurt by one. And apart from that the regulations are not even well thought out, they will not stop a determined teenager with a lot of time on their hands.

The vaccine does not stop covid, it does not make you immune, it does not stop you from spreading covid and you will have to get another dose after about 3 months. And then there are possible adverse effects like myocarditis, especially for young men. All this should be considered.

There are other ways to strengthen your immune system. They should be considered too. Most people that have died due to covid have been severely ill, morbidly obese or very old. Eating healthy, getting enough exercise and making sure Vitamin D levels are sufficient will make covid much less dangerous. I much prefer that to constantly getting new boosters.

Not OP, but it looks like they are using texlab for completion: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/server_configurations.md#texlab

Apart from that there is https://github.com/lervag/vimtex with file type support, document compilation, etc. For grammar checking I use https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/server_configurations.md#ltex and for snippets https://github.com/L3MON4D3/LuaSnip. See https://github.com/iurimateus/luasnip-latex-snippets.nvim for latex snippets and what you can do with them.

Some facts about the Gaza Strip:

• Population: ~2.3 Million
• Area: 365 km² (141 sq mi)
  • 41 km (25 mi) long, from 6 to 12 km (3.7 to 7.5 mi) wide
• Population density: ~6300/km² 1

Gaza is very densely populated. In Gaza live as many people as in Houston. But Houston has an area of 1658.6 km² (640.4 sq mi). Thus Gaza has nearly five times the population density of Houston. New York City is the only city in the US with a population of more than a million and a higher population density than Gaza. 2 The tallest building in Palestine stands at 76.1 m (255 ft). 3

A little less than half of the population of Gaza is made up of children. 4

There are only three ("legal") ways in and out of Gaza:

• Rafah Crossing into Egypt in the south
• Kerem Shalom Crossing into Israel in the south
• Erez Crossing into Israel in the north

Gaza has a very small port. It can only be used by small fisher boats. 5

Israel built a wall and fences around Gaza. 6

Considering that recent polls show the AfD at ~30% in some states, I doubt banning it will work. The only reasons it's gotten this big is abysmal politics by the current and former govt. I'm pretty sure banning it is only going to make things worse. And I am not at all convinced you can truly consider them ban worthy like actual Nazis, even though the current govt would very much like you to think this way.

You know what's also been disappearing? The clip where Rachel Maddow claims "the virus stops with every vaccinated person" on MSNBC. Has anyone admitted that the efficacy of the new vaccines has been massively overstated?

Less regulations, it's easier to do "funny stuff" like gain of function research (frankly a euphemism for biological warfare research) in China than in the US. And it's not like the US is just funding the biolab, they have people on site and oversight as well.

Meanwhile in Germany:

Krieger wider Willen - Warrior against his [Olaf Scholz - Germany's chancellor] will

Putins blutige Spur - Putin's bloody path

Gefährlich schwach - dangerously weak

Putin ist ein Drache, der fressen muss - Putin is a dragon that needs to feed

Wie schwach ist Putin? - How weak is Putin?

Please explain your argument, I do not think it makes any sense but instead dangerously misjudges the Russian government/military.

Assuming they have a child-like mentality:

• Why is there no massive bombardment of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure? Might as well do that for cities out of reach instead of blowing up a NPP.
• Why didn't Putin order to have all Wagner soldiers killed after what happened a few days ago?

Scientists still don’t have a clear explanation yet for why the vaccines cause the condition, according to Dr. Paul Burton, Moderna's chief medical officer. He expects the virus’s spike protein, once produced in the cell after vaccination, may generate a reaction in the body that can cause inflammation in the heart.

“We don’t understand yet and there’s no good mechanism to explain it,” he said.

And that's the exact reason why, under normal circumstances, it takes years until you can bring a new vaccine on the market. Even more so, if said vaccine is based on a new technology that's never been widely tested on humans before.

No, I just think they shouldn't do the kind of patent hogging that we observe now and make instructions to produce the vaccine freely available. Like that we can have healthy competition on who is able to produce the vaccine most efficiently. I am pretty sure this would drive pricing down a lot.

BioNTech wins $445 mln German grant for COVID-19 vaccine

Exactly what I thought when I heard about the planned price hike. The results of those public funds should be available to, you know, the public...

So much text and so little content. So apparently it's normal not to test new vaccines for transmission. My problem is that media, politicians and even scientist have spun the narrative that the vaccines are very good at preventing infections and transmission, see for example: https://youtu.be/jDtUWXOmLLg?t=400. Many decisions have been made based on that assumption. And that is wrong.

Doesn't make him wrong on this. I mean if Adolf Hitler said 2+2=4, he'd still be right.

Looks like the US Navy was around Bornholm at the very time and place of the (alleged) sabotage: https://twitter.com/AZmilitary1/status/1574758898086694912

What a coincidence.

Meanwhile German mainstream media is already spewing out theories about Russian sabotage of their own pipeline and conveniently never mentions the actual prime suspect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS4O8rGRLf8&t=81s

Full context: https://youtu.be/78-_Ou5sH3k?t=4975

Do you think this is that much better?

millions of people quit the workforce due to long covid

Do you have a source for that, that number sounds way too high to me?

Yeah lets just keep letting it rip and have our immunity systems get so wrecked that theres now a second pandemic ongoing (monkeypox)

Monkeypox is not a pandemic and they way it currently is, will not become a pandemic.

What do you mean by immune system getting wrecked? Are the vaccines not able to prevent that? Also there is natural immunity, you most likely won't get as sick if you are exposed to the virus or a similar variant of it for a second time.

Tbh, the only alternative to letting it rip now is something like this:

Nobody ever gets to leave their ~2m^3 house.

Vaccines and Omicron mean Covid now less deadly than flu in England: https://www.ft.com/content/e26c93a0-90e7-4dec-a796-3e25e94bc59b

https://archive.ph/20220713210432/https://www.ft.com/content/e26c93a0-90e7-4dec-a796-3e25e94bc59b

Perhaps you can find something here https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 or in the visualization https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Many people? In the grand theme of things most people have been vaccinated…

2+ billion people don’t trust the new vaccines? lmao

Also, guess which country still doesn't offer mRNA shots? Ohh, right that would be China! Instead classical vaccines are used. But clearly China is also antivaxx because they do not trust the new mRNA vaccines?

Don't change the topic then and talk about the number of people that trust the vaccines, not just the number of vaccinated people.

You are absolutely right, 2+ billion people is not that many...

How nice of you, despite evidence that the vaccine often does fuckup the menstrual cycle you still do not take these reports seriously! You do realize that this dismissiveness is the very reason so many people do not trust the new vaccines?

and antivaxxers have been known to lie

Ahh, yes all of the following reports are straight lies and everyone posting is antivaxx:

I commented in another thread about this recently, but I have been on continual birth control for 10+ and do not get a period at all. And I never have breakthrough. About 3 weeks after my first vaccine, I woke up with the worst cramping of my life. I thought my appendix burst - but quickly realized I was also heavily bleeding. It was the worst period cramping I’ve had since I was 13. And I bled for eight weeks straight - heavy and painful the whole time. I got my second shot right around when it started, which i assume didn’t help things.

I got checked for miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, everything. All clear. Then I found a study that was tracking menstrual changes in women post vaccine, so I participated in that, and also submitted a vaers report. There were so many gaslighting articles around that time that came out - saying it was probably caused by anxiety about getting the shot, or that it was all in our heads, or that maybe it could happen, but it would be very minor. It sucked to be going through it and have everyone dismiss it.

I did get 2 boosters after all that. And interestingly I had no breakthrough at all after either. I’m so glad info is coming out finally - it’s nice to just be heard. I don’t want this to be an anti-vax message. I had covid recently and it sucked a lot more than 8 weeks of period. But women should know there is potential for things to be weird for a bit after.

I know three women personally who have had full blown periods return after being menopausal for several years. It's been horrible for them.

I commented about this a year back using a different username. I just mentioned how three women in my close circle had their periods missed or cycle completely messed up. I was called an anti vaxxers just for expressing my experience. Four major subreddits banned my account although myself and my family were double vaxxed at that time. Just goes to show why it is important to let people speak even if the opinions are against currently understood facts.

The fact that they denied it for so long and are finally recognizing it after way over a year is sickening. Tons of women I know dealt with this and were told they were wrong or crazy even though they know their cycles.

A depressing reminder that symptoms presented in mainly female patients is considered atypical in our medical textbooks and most medicine we have were never tested on female bodies of childbearing age.

I’m not the least bit shocked that the vaccine was causing abnormal periods or no periods; AND was largely ignored. I’ve had several friends (ages between 20-28) who lost their periods completely for 3-4 months and some who had heavy and painful ones after getting the vaccine. Still pro-vaccine though.

Mine has been so weird since the vaccine. But doctors here in New Zealand just dismiss it. Used to be like clockwork and predictable then it turned into a heavy uncontrollable mess stop start. Felt awful fatigue, headaches. Had blood tests, had an ultrasound, they said they thought they found a polyp. Went for a hysteroscopy today. Couldnt find any polyp at all.

In the past month been drinking a cup of hormone balance tea daily and period seems to be back to normal.

When women first started stating this when the vaccines first start rolling out it was chalked up to "Oh it's just anxiety and stress because of these unprecedented times. So basically it's all in your head. Try to relax more." Pretty common for the medical community to write off women's pain and health concerns. Nothing new.

Have a look at the reddit comments. A lot of women have suffered from this and were not taken seriously, i.e. a lot of physicians hadn't considered this. So I think it's good this is getting some attention.

The vaccine simply uses mRNA code to tell cells to produce a bit of protein. This doesn’t harm the cells

That's just not true, cells exposing the spike protein after being forced to produce it by the mRNA vaccine will also be attacked by the immune system. While not necessarily all these cells will be killed there is still some amount of damage that's being done.

How is mRNA and its container harmful, what exactly is the concern?

Regarding the container aka lipid nanoparticles: I do not know and as far as I can tell there has been too little previous work on this to enable us to make long term predictions.

Meanwhile a decision in the opposite direction has been made in Germany. In Germany physicians were not allowed to publicly advertise if they were offering abortions. Now the law preventing that has been abolished.

In my opinion this was well overdue. To be honest, I can't quite fathom what's going on in the US. Can anyone explain why the republicans are so hellbent on forcing women to have babies they do not want?

That’s not how the immune system works!

What's that even supposed to mean? If an object enters your body and provokes an immune response it is by definition harmful at least in the way that the immune system requires energy to destroy it. I. e. you are better off if said object doesn't enter your body in the first place.

The protein is not the harmful part of the virus. You don’t understand how the virus works.

My bad, I meant to say the mRNA and its container, which is what my main concern is.

It’s not, this is literally what the effect of the vaccine is.

Perhaps you are missing my point, let me restate it: The virus does damage by attacking cells which then are forced to replicate the virus. Thus these cells are attacked by the immune system and die. A very similar thing happens with mRNA vaccines. Except that cells are only forced to replicate a part of the virus which itself can not do any further replication. If both mRNA vaccine and virus were always distributed very similarly and thus affected pretty much the same cells, I could not see how the vaccine could possibly be more dangerous than the virus and for quite a while I thought this was obviously the case. But this is not true. Distribution as well as dosage may differ.

At least for the short term we do know by observation that statistically taking the vaccine, especially for high risk groups, is much safer than getting infected. But I still think there are too many variables to consider to make a proper prediction about how possible long terms effects of an infection compare to these of the vaccines.

People seem to be rather dismissive about potential long term effects, and the gamble may backfire spectacularly.

You are right, this is a gamble I am willing to take. At the beginning of the pandemic I might have favored a very strict lockdown like in China but at this point its just too late, we have to accept that COVID-19 is going to stay.

There is absolutely no evidence to support the notion that the protein is in any way harmful

Of course the protein is harmful, if it were not our immune system would not attack it and cells producing it. If it weren't harmful the vaccination would not even work in the first place. The question is how harmful it is and in how far having it produced via mRNA injections differs from what the virus itself does.

And we do know that the virus reaches pretty much everywhere including your heart and brain

Yes, the dosage and distribution matter though, the distribution of the protein via the vaccine is surely going to be different from what the virus does.

It’s not even comparable.

For young people it actually is at least regarding myocarditis, see https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf But admittedly, there are a lot of papers and of course I am cherry picking here. What I want to say is that things are not as clear cut as you make them sound to be.

Saying that we know that having your cells produce a bit of protein that your immune system then destroys is less risky than having a virus attack your organs is just stating the obvious.

This is the very oversimplification I have tried to point out. How is any of us supposed to know that? Also note that our immune system is not only destroying the protein but also the cells producing it. This is actually how you get myocarditis. If the mRNA gets into your blood stream and subsequently reaches your heart, your heart may start producing spike proteins which in turn makes your heart a target for your immune system.

I sure hope your assessment is right though, actually I think mRNA vaccines are a fascinating technology and I'd love to see them developed further.

playing mental gymnastics.

Well, in a way science is exactly that :)

I can’t fathom how anybody would prefer dealing with the nightmare that we’ve lived through to China style lockdowns where you stay home for a few weeks and life goes back to normal.

That's why we have discussions like this! I can assure you there is a significant amount of people like me, who absolutely prefer the current situation to what's going on in China. Also note that even though some of the lockdowns in China have been lifted, the situation is far from back to normal.

And no, the very thing cannot be said about the new vaccinations. We have a much better idea of what the vaccines do because we design them.

Ehh, I would not be so sure. The way most of these vaccines work is by injecting mRNA which makes your cells produce a part of the Virus, namely the Spike protein. This protein is known from sequencing the virus. There are several unknowns. Obviously it is impossible to tell what kinds of damage the presence of the Spike protein may cause in the long term, especially if it is produced at places the virus itself may not even reach as it is not injected into your body. (Something that is known is that mRNA vaccines, especially if administered improperly and the mRNA is injected into the blood stream your risk of getting myocarditis is greatly increased.) Something else to consider is that the delivery of the mRNA via nano lipid particles is also a very new technique which to my knowledge has previously never been widely tested on humans. So there is no proper long term data either.

Saying we have a good idea of possible adverse side effect of a medicament just because we designed it is incredibly naive. It's not like we perfectly understand how the immune system works and can just design the perfect vaccine. Instead all that's been done is to take a part of the virus and have it built using mRNA in your body and then hope for the best.

This is the very reason why developing vaccines takes many years, you have to make sure there are no severe adverse long term effects by observation, because you do not fully understand what the vaccine is doing within the body. I do not think it is reasonable to expect that vaccines developed in a tiny fraction of the time typically required are as safe and performant as those developed within the normal time frame.

In short, I think the situation is way to complex to make predictions as good as to allow comparing long term effects of the virus with that of the vaccines.

the virus is still actively mutating

Just as about every other virus. One example is the common cold which actually can be caused by Coronaviruses (not SARS-CoV-2 of course). Yet we never made a fuss about that even though it's theoretically possible that one of these viruses mutates into something dangerous.

Letting this thing run wild through the population is a very dangerous experiment.

Vaccination is (sadly) not changing that. I am not sure what's supposed to be done but to just let it run wild. The only thing I can think of is lockdowns like currently in China for the rest of time. This is definitely not something I'd want.

We have no idea how dangerous covid is long term

This very thing can also be said about the new vaccinations. Every medication has adverse side effects and just as with COVID-19 we have no clue how things will be in say ten years.

Tbh, probably nothing as COVID-19 is not dangerous enough to bring healthcare in Austria to a collapse. And as vaccinations do not prevent the spread of the virus and only provide some short term protection against COVID-19, it makes a lot of sense that getting the vaccine should be your personal choice.

Have you made sure all submodules are checked out, i.e. did you run git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy.git --recursive with the --recursive flag?

While I think a lot of you guys here will probably agree with this decision, I think it is really stupid.

Sadly the vaccination doesn't protect the majority of people (ages 18-59) from infections at all anymore. This can be seen in the following diagram from the Robert Koch Institute (the German CDC), which shows infections among unvaccinated, vaccinated and boosted people per 100,000. (Source)

All the vaccination can do, albeit to a limited degree, is prevent a severe disease and death. This means if you actually wanted to protect vulnerable people you wouldn't push vaccination just because but instead make tests (and masks) mandatory for health care workers around those groups.

And all that would not even be enough, it's not only humans that can be infected. From Wikipedia:

Cats, dogs, ferrets, fruit bats, gorillas, pangolins, hamsters, mink, sea otters, pumas, snow leopards, tigers, lions, hyenas, tree shrews and whitetail deer can be infected with and have tested positive at least once for the virus.

Good luck quarantining(lol)/culling all these animals...

Well, the question was "Who's more authoritarian?", not who had the better response to COVID-19 and I just thought the timing to consider China less authoritarian with what's going on there right now rather comical.

Also, it’s a real bold claim that covid quarantine is equivalent to an actual prison.

Compared to prisons in US that's probably true, lol. But still, a friend of mine is in lockdown since 1st of April and they haven't left their flat since. Also food delivery broke down for a few days and they had to life of their stocked milk for four days. Certainly not a situation I'd like to be in.

True two months ago but now China has achieved something entirely impossible for the US, namely the imprisonment of more people than even live in the US: Nearly 400 million people are under covid lockdown in China

No, I know my numbers, no surprise here. Also IMO the headline is a classic example of all the fearmongering that's been going on.

Nearly 250,000 people under the age of 65 have died of Covid-19 in the United States so far. Around 61,000 of these deaths were in people under the age of 50.

61,000/250,000 = 61/250 = 24.4%

So not even 1/4 of those under the age 65 that died of COVID-19 are also younger than 50 years old. And considering all ages, those under age 50 total to

61,000/1,000,000 = 61 / 1000 = 6.1%

which is definitely not more than I expected.

But I guess the main takeaway from the article is:

Covid-19 has caused a greater deviation from normal death rates among non-seniors than seniors.

In numbers:

Since the start of the pandemic there has been a 30% increase in all-cause mortality among US adults ages 18-49, and a 26% increase among adults ages 50-64. The increase has been “just” 17% for adults ages 65 and up.

Which is commented like this

However, because the usual mortality rate for seniors is so much higher to begin with, the raw numerical increases in mortality among seniors has been greater, accounting for around two-thirds of all excess deaths since the pandemic erupted on US soil.

leaving out the flip side, which is that even though mortality for younger people increased more than that for older people, in total it still is not going to amount to much because the absolute mortality numbers for young people are very low.

This is especially true for actual young people under age 30. If you are under 30 years old, it's more likely that you die in a traffic accident than with COVID-19...

I'd rather have an article with a headline like: "Cars deadlier than COVID-19 for young people" posted to c/fuck_cars.

That head line though... Infecting babies sounds like a good thing like this.

What's actually in the rest of the article of course paints a slightly different picture:

data from 46 individuals who received care at a hospital for COVID-19

So this is not about long COVID in general but about people that had to be hospitalized.

Six months after their stay in hospital [...] measure their memory, attention and reasoning.

those who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 were less accurate and displayed slower response times

These results were "similar in magnitude to the effects of ageing between 50 and 70 years of age," the authors wrote.

And this is where they got their headline from.