Question: Assuming I'm not able to wait the full two weeks for full efficacy, to avoid traveling while experiencing side effects, how long after my second Pfizer dose do I need to wait before I get on an airplane?
Everyone I've heard has had at most 2 days of bad side effects.
I feel like there's too much emphasis on "wait 2 weeks after the second dose." The change between nothing and 2 weeks after the *first* does is the big change, everything after that is pretty small. It's important to get the second dose for long-term reasons, and it's important to keep doing easy mitigation stuff until COVID rates plummet (i.e. wearing a mask indoors, and avoiding mass gatherings), but I think all this emphasis on waiting after the second dose is misguided. The level of protection in the "partially vaccinated" regime (i.e. more than 14 days after the first shot) is way better than optimistic predictions for full protection from a vaccine a year ago and just as good as the one-shot vaccines.
True, but my travel will put me in close contact with the most vulnerable and the administrators will probably be looking at my card.
One more bit of anecdata, Cassandane had side effects from her second shot and they mostly seem to be over now, almost exactly 48 hours since she got it. The details aren't quite so recent for me but were similar in timeframe.
As for other stuff, I'm really struggling to finish one more task at work before going on vacation Saturday (two or three tasks to get through before I go, but only one is really problematic). It's the unpleasant parts of an unpleasant task with a short deadline of a job that has had too many things like that lately. I feel bad complaining about a job that lets me work from home these days and occasionally I can even get away with playing games during the workday, but this vacation is overdue.
4: That's a good reason to put travel off for the full two weeks or as close to it as possible, but doesn't seem to have much to do with side effects of the vaccine. Unless you think they won't let you see these vulnerable people if you have symptoms, even though those symptoms are probably caused by the vaccine rather than infection? If that's the concern, you should be fine ~4 days after the second shot, ex recto, unless a doctor tells you otherwise.
4: Fair enough! I certainly agree that additional caution makes sense in that circumstance.
Assuming you get your second Pfizer shot three weeks after the first, it looks like 90+% efficacy seven days after the second shot:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00448-7/fulltext
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
So I think getting on a plane 7 days after the second shot would be reasonable. Wear a KN95 and don't lick the armrests.
But I fly Southwest. I need to fit in.
Ooh, this is relevant to my interests, having just gotten my first shot today, and wanting to plan to go see Sally for the first time since Christmas 2019 ASAP.
It might be safer the other way, but the principle matters.
I got my first AZ dose on Tuesday. Woke up the next morning (yesterday) with fever and chills and a general sense of malaise. Feel fine today, other than a sore arm.
You were waking up without a general sense of malaise before? What's that like?
The US vaccine rollout under Biden is just so truly impressive. Canadians are left struggling to maintain our usual sense of moral superiority, in the face of a New Deal-type programme that shows us what the US feds can do, that basically leaves us behind in the dust...
Just got my second Pfizer vaccine. 10 minutes more to sit here.
I'm 9 hours from my second Moderna shot. Feeling a little dizzy - I think the side effects are kicking in right on schedule, and my arm has been getting more sore all day. I'm not sure how I'm going to feel when I get up at 7am to band some birds, but I only have a 24 hour window for that so I'm going to give it a try. Well, at least I'll wake up and roll over and think about it.
My daughter -- young, very healthy, basically the last person on the planet eligible for a dose -- got her first shot today, meaning my gang will be all set by mid-May. I don't think I can even imagine what it's going to be like going back out into the world. But I'm looking forward to it.
19: You didn't know that feeling morally superior to the Yanks was, for Canadians, kind of a thing?! It's been a thing since at least the War of 1812, I guess ...
Got my second Moderna dose this morning. My arm really hurts and I feel a bit icky but not terrible.
15. It's a weird feeling being told that Americans are doing something right.
I just have this intuition that Biden is a better president than Trump.
Next week are our second shots. Monday I turned in my giant project, and have been enjoying a few days of cleanup and turning around the small projects in its wake.
Spring's been beautiful here (even if a bit dry); the yard's blooming, and it's taking serious work to keep ahead of the sticker vines. I'm enjoying this pause before temperatures climb for summer.
23: I have this weird feeling that he'll be a better president than Obama, because he's less analytical and really focused on management and making sure people see the way that the gov't is helping them. And I always hated Biden because of the bankruptcy bill.
Also, he's basically given up on negotiating with the Republicans other than Manchin.
22. The US has the best COVID-19 vaccine programme in the world. I'm pretty sure this is not even open to question...
I got my second Pfizer shot Tuesday night and felt mostly fine (slight headache, minor chills, very sore arm) until yesterday afternoon at which point I couldn't keep my eyes open.
because he's less analytical and really focused on management and making sure people see the way that the gov't is helping them.
Also, he's not Black, and working-class whites will therefore support him... (wish that were not true, but I'm pretty sure it is...).
I'm not sure it is. At least not from my brief time calling people in the Mon Valley.
26: There are folks who think the UK is doing a better job. The Canada one is scary. Tim's Mom has an appointment for Sunday, but the 2nd one is 4 months later. The NHS is doing 12-week intervals. He got access already due to his job.
28: So, he can get stuff passed, you mean, because he's white. Or I prefer him because he's white. I'm never super impressed with him personally, but I like his team - Ron Klain. Janet Yellen is not a Wall Street type. And she saw the 2008 BU bubble in advance. Because I just really prefer this expansive, simpler government to technocratic solutions that don't come into effect for 4 years. Different era, I know.
Still annoyed at PA that my 64.8 year old mom still can't get vaccinated. I don't understand why PA is fucking everything up.
20: No, I know the history, I didn't realize Canada was doing so poorly on vaccines as to flip the script.
There are folks who think the UK is doing a better job
Eh, I dunno, But it looks to me like the US has surpassed every other country in the world, with a US federal New Deal-like programme... (and also with domestic vaccine production, combined with vacccine nationalism/protectionism, of course).
I think Chile's vaccination is the most impressive, given the built-in advantages the US and the UK had. (There's also Israel, but it's harder to know how to count in an apartheid state that won't vaccinate a huge portion of its residents.) Of course Chile is managing to fuck it up by letting COVID spike even while they're vaccinating.
Wait, what's up with Bhutan? Maybe it's Bhutan or the Maldives that wins?
I'm 50 hours out from Moderna 2 and still having chills and fatigue. Tail of the distribution, I guess.
31: Still? Everybody is getting shots here.
The whole of Pittsburgh COVID reddit is like "anybody over 18 can get a shot here."
If I wasn't at home feeling sorry for myself, I'd be having a beer with the architect next door, and his Canadian girlfriend, who is flying home to Yellowknife tomorrow. Flying to Vancouver, actually, to a quarantine hotel for some days, and then to Yellowknife for a longer quarantine there. She's had a first shot, and the second one came due while she was here. We were encouraging her to get it here, but I don't know if she tried that. (She's got indigenous heritage, and so we were thinking that the local indigenous people's health service might be willing to disregard the 49th parallel.)
38: is the point you just lie about smoking?
No. They ran out of people who were willing, so they opened it up.
and his Canadian girlfriend
Shure, the perhaps real, perhaps mythical, Canadian girlfriend ... I think we've all been there! (some of us really are Canadian, though, and we tend to see ourselves as real...)
41: I can't see that in any news reports, there's lots of reports about available appointment slots but everything says you have to be in 1B to be eligible. Is this some kind of waiting list?
Two weeks ago, it was rare. You had to be willing to drive two hours from town on short notice (which I was). Now they shots are coming from inside the city.
Ooh, thanks, I think I've found somewhere near my parents (SC, but Pittsburgh) that's also decided to ignore the stages.
"Not" got autocorrected to "but"
You really need to have your mom check her Reddit account more often.
Every American has made this joke. She's real and she's spectacular.
Clever people, a question:
The Roc gov is saying they hope to have indigenously developed vaccines in production by June-July; AIUI there's one candidate that's through Phase II trials. While inclined to give the Rocs the benefit of the doubt, I'm discomfited (1) that the trials apparently have measured immune response alone (because there's no circulating Covid in country); and (2) that Phase III apparently involves trials out-of-country, where ethical issues arise for the control group (because effective vaccines already exist). Set my mind at ease (or not). IIRC the companies involved are Medigen Vaccine Biologics and United Biomedical Inc Asia, if it matters.
I don't know enough to answer 1. If there is actual informed consent and some reasonable chance the new vaccine improves on the old (lower side effects, longer lasting, etc) there is nothing inherently unethical about testing in a group that is low risk of death and serious covid. Probably hard to justify a placebo control.
If the whole idea is to boost domestic industry and they are testing in a disadvantaged population, then that's not so good.
My worries are about the science not the ethics. On the local industry bit, it's also been implied by the Rocs that a large early supply agreement with BioNTech was sabotaged by PRC interference. Which hasn't been established in public but is certainly credible.
It's unethical to do the science badly given the risk here.
Just popped over from the other place since some jackass was trying to mansplain the Chauvin trial to one of my anarchist friends. I think I can trust that someone else will tear him a new one over there, so no need to rile myself up for no reason. Anyhow, you just gotta wonder sometimes about our solons here in Mordor-apolis. I mean, have you seen our downtown? It's like fucking Attica or something. Everywhere is now the gulag. What I just can't figure out, what really keeps me up at night wondering is this:
Do they think we only have one police station?
Did you see the ridiculous fort they built around the downtown precinct last summer? Like that would stop a couple thousand people who were not fucking around. Pfft. It's the non-seriousness that bugs me. You know why? Because I know a lot of people are taking it serious. The moneyed interests think they can mouth a few platitudes and pay off some activists and everything will go back to normal and the developers and sports teams can get back to fleecing us with their ugly stadia and offices. But I don't think it works like that. This was a DEEP FUCKING WOUND. You don't get to shrug that off with the equivalent of a few "And some still call him 'pig'" billboards and a summer jobs program. Black people in Minneapolis are going to remember George Floyd for a long, long time. White people could profit by their example.
49: Don't be so quick to besmirch the honor of your own country. It was the Canadian who made the joke this time.
It turns out that the Republicans are right about Europe -- it's a failure. Vaccines here are through your personal doctor (you get assigned one by the government, though you can switch). My wife finally broke down and called about getting the vaccine, and learned that only people who are 75 or older are eligible. (I guess this better than Vienna and their age 90 cutoff.) All the Americans in Europe are talking about taking trips back to the US just to get the vaccine. I've also seen ads for vaccine tourism to Serbia -- you can book a trip that combines a vaccine and sightseeing.
56: the comparisons between Europe & the US are so infuriating to me, because it seems like everyone has forgotten that the US is (still) refusing to export any vaccines produced on their territory. This was all completely predictable a year ago when the US bought up the bulk of the supply and refused to allow export. Of course the roll out was going to happen this way.
My wife attached to that narrative, but the EU is not helpless here. If it was so predictable, why didn't the EU bureaucrats predict it, and do something about it? Instead they signed contracts months after the US and UK, and tried to drive a hard bargain on price. Shit, if it's literally impossible to make the vaccines here, then issue a trade embargo on the entire US if they need to.
NMM to the royal consort. Missed a century by two months.
It looks like another big part of the problem is that the EU was skeptical of the mRNA vaccines so chose not to invest in them, and several of the non-mRNA vaccines didn't pan out.
This wasn't a situation to nickel-and-dime. Europe is rich enough to just buy all the vaccines and invest in factories in the EU, but they didn't because they're so afraid of spending money.
I got my second Pfizer shot exactly 2 weeks ago. Protip: those plastic slip cases that conferences use for badges (back when there were conferences) are the perfect size for vaccination cards.
Our recent spike in cases that I thought was just beginning has started going back down. I'm not sure whether it's the vaccines or the weather.
Mrs. Lurker is in Massachusetts and has been unable to even get an appointment for the first shot. It sounds ridiculous: web sites don't get updated, schedules appointments get cancelled because the vaccine that was supposed to be delivered never arrives & etc. Are other people in Mass finding them to be that incompetent?
57: There was an article about this in Vanity Fair. We signed contracts prohibiting us from doing that. The drug makers got huge liability protections in the US and they did not get the same concessions elsewhere. That's why the AZ vaccine that went to Canada was a loan.
Also, please can we find a way to get J&J manufacturing up, Novavax approved by FDA and in the UK. May the prime with AZ finish with Pfizer studies look good.
61: Keeping my fingers crossed for Curevac in Europe.
50-52. Really ignorant question, what is "Roc"?
62: Register on the state website for the mass sites. If she's in a priority for group, she'll hear back in 1-2 weeks. Tim had good luck with the Atrius/ Harvard Vanguard in Needham. You don't need to be their patient. They are linked to the state website. Their Epic scheduling system failed in me halfway through, but I called and person scheduled.
BMC has had appointments too, but they are prioritizing people with care there.
Today is the first virtual conference that I've been unable to avoid, this pandemic. We're about twenty minutes in, and I'm very done with it. Unfortunately, I'm on the organizing committee.
You're on the committee, so just declare it over.
"Sorry, thought we had something. Was wrong. We'll try again. Next year in Jerusalem. "
But all these other people want to say stuff! Slowly!
16: I had all these dreams that I was feeling very sick from the vaccination. Once I woke up, it took a while for me to realize I actually feel ok. My arm is sore, but that's about it.
70: As an organizer, surely you have a "Wrap it up" box.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-emlb2_jdI
I've never had dreams about losing my teeth (and I'm still not). But over the last week, I've been borderline-compulsively haunted by the notion that I'm going to bite down, and somehow my lower front teeth will be wobbly enough that my top teeth come down on the inside, and knock my lower front teeth out of socket. It's super creepy. I keep feeling the phantom sensation of the rough edges of the base of the teeth being exposed against by tongue, and the wrenching of gums.
(how do you make it stop when you're just freaking yourself out without good reason?)
The success of the US with vaccines is being characterized as a result of a rejection of neoliberalism.
It's true that the US threw a lot of money at the problem, but they threw the money at corporations. Had the US approach failed, or if the US succeeded no better than Europe while shoveling money and other concessions to pharmaceutical companies, I have a feeling that critics would cite this as a failure of neoliberalism.
The vaccination speed really seems to be a vindication of that old saw about the US always doing the right thing after they've tried everything else.
This time, we tried much harder at racism than usual.
More to the point, Opinionated Henry Ford would also like a word.
I like 75, but other than that I'm delaying judgment on the various vaccination efforts until they're over. Death rates are still high.
On the optimistic side, deaths are still dropping steadily (nationwide 7-day rolling average was 1,243 on Mar. 15, 901 on Apr. 1, 762 yesterday), raising the prospect that the next surge will be less deadly thanks to the vaccines.
AcademicLurker - NH is opening to out-of-state residents on April 19, because they have a lot.
(how do you make it stop when you're just freaking yourself out without good reason?)
Weed, but I'm told others have found their mileage varies.
Weed is great when I want to inhale three packages of girl scout cookies and fall asleep in the crumbs. But I've lost the ability to have fun in any other dimension, unfortunately.
I can eat that many cookies when I'm sober.
You need to be careful because the same cookies have different names in different parts of the county. Thin Mints are always Thin Mints, but they aren't the best kind.
Did we ever find out why they don't have chocolate chip cookies?
Mrs. Fields makes very convincing death threats.
Got the second Pfizer shot yesterday. Feeling achy and sick today, but not much worse than a standard flu vaccine (which, for me, means 12-18 hours of ick) hoping for a similarly quick recovery today.
The flu vaccine is about like that for me at the worst. Some years, I don't even feel it.
This is definitely worse than my reaction to a flu vaccine. I feel mostly present mentally, but have an odd difficulty standing or sitting up. I have spent much of the morning laying down, and not really able to do anything else. . .
(I guess this better than Vienna and their age 90 cutoff.)
In fairness to Vienna, they've supposedly started with 70 year olds last week...
So I need permission from higher management to travel this summer due to the pandemic and just received an email from HR that asks me to confirm that I have read and understood the "sacrum stances of your decision to travel during the current pandemic". "Sacrum stances"?
I got 2nd Pfizer yesterday at 1:30, went to lie down at 5:00. Slept and woke up at 7:30. I had slept some in the car on the way home. I was definitely feeling something within the 15 minutes. Overnight, feverish and bad headache. Threw up some around 3 am. Just threw up the ginger ale I drank.
Head hurts, and wondering if I should take Tylenol.
Everything I've seen is that you can take anything OTC you want after the vaccine. If you think it'll help, take it.
Headache and nausea, the sort of thing you're describing, I treat with calm podcasts. If you queue up a few hours of something like In Our Time, you can drift in and out of napping with low key British people burbling on about something mildly but not very interesting -- it's just enough stimulation to keep you from focusing on how bad you feel, but not enough to be bothersome.
98: That sounds promising. I did take a Zofran that I had from when I got my septoplasty and had nausea, but I'm not sure it 's still potent.
55 The powers that be do seem to be abandoning Chauvin. Assuming a conviction and some sort of mid-range sentence, what happens next?
I had some nausea last night. I didn't throw up but my stomach is still unhappy this morning.
I have been thinking about Moby's comment that people who don't have experience with them underestimate autoimmune disorders. It's strange to know that, for example, not being able to sit up for more than 15-20 minutes at a time, was just an effect of my own immune system.
98 I do the same thing with In Our Time whenever I want to take a nap or have trouble falling asleep for the night.
I have a vaccine appointment literally the same day it officially opens up to everyone 16+!
101.2 - welcome to my experience of having a body! and i've got it much much much better than many women in my family.
if/when there is any progress at understanding the complexities of how/when the immune system goes off the rails i firmly believe the following, all of which i freely offer to the med profession:
- the immune system "turns on the body" all the damn time, it's part of the constantly calibrating business of having a body with lots of microbes outside and in.
- women's immune systems are more complex and challenged than men's because of the whole gestating an entirely different human.
- babies leave their own dna chez mom (each one! and as i understand it there may be some birth order and gender hierarchy dynamics among 'em), so that a woman who has been pregnant for x period of time (how much less than full term would be a great thing to research!) is going to have an immune system liable to be canoning off against kiddo dna for the rest of her life, potentially sending the system off the rails.
- the current diagnostic categories (rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, ms, psoriasis, ibd, etc etc etc) will turn out to be slippery slidey things on a miserable array.
anyways, on other fronts i can report that doing 3 sets of turns with brioche dough is the most ridiculously excellent effort-to-payoff thing *ever*, and if you add some brown sugar and cardamom at each turn you get way awesome buns.
amazingly pretty swim this morning, the crissy field temperature buoy reporting 55.8f, the cove almost certain trails by a couple of degrees particularly bc was at the end of an ebb with cold spring runoff in it, but man is it less of a psychological oompf to immerse.
96. One study Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs Dampen the Cytokine and Antibody Response to SARS-CoV-2 Infection says that taking anti-inflammatories (Naproxen, Ibuprofen, etc.) before or after the shot isn't a great idea, because they may lower the immune response to the virus. The CDC says not to take them before, is okay taking them after. (Which seems weird, since your immune system is still responding for a couple of weeks; you shouldn't want to damp it down.)
Just taking them preventatively seems like bad idea, but if you are having side effects to the extent that you need pain relief and you can take NSAIDs, take the NSAIDs. It's going to be hard enough to get herd immunity without the "you must suffer to be sure you have the best protection" thing going around.
106: Which I totally put myself through. I think I would have taken Tylenol rather than an NSAID, because I get better headache relief with that. The nausea and vomiting was the toughest part. Still feeling gross but I had some graham crackers and coconut water with orange juice. About to eat chicken soup. Still in my pajamas.
I'm not saying NSAIDs are better than Tylenol. Just whatever you usually take when you feel shitty in the particular way, the CDC says you may as well take it.
Anyway, the news is all about how they have shut down vaccination sites over side effects, and those side effects included the kinds of things that NSAIDs or Tylenol can make go away.
The consensus seems to be to take Tylenol (acetaminophen). That's what the person who gave me the shot recommended, and it worked pretty well for me.
In the U.K., they pronounce it "paracetamol".
They told us the same thing LB said.
Anyway, perhaps I've spent too much time working for rheumatologists, but lots of people need to take NSAIDs just to get around regular.
Well, a lotta people aren't doing too great around here tonight. I wrote such a nice little internationalist hymn over a le autre place, and then the cops had to go and ruin everything by shooting someone. In the usual dubious circumstances, of course. I'm so tired of it all. How messed up is it that on the Big List of 2020 Outrages, the fact that there was a police shooting *literally* in my back yard probably only makes it to #37 or so??? I don't know if the depths of division in the city really come through in the national reporting. Within a few hours of the killing, I had posts on my wall from 1. The leader of a non-profit that does some kind of mutual aid work with women accusing other leaders in the Black community of advocating immediate, violent reprisals for today's murder. 2. A long time acquaintance in the anti-police brutality activist scene calling out a dozen left-leaning community organizations for taking money from the city to "observe" the mood and activity in the city around the Chauvin trial. People, and I mean A LOT of people, are thoroughly disgusted with the mayor and everyone on the city council. I don't claim to be able to prognosticate exactly what all this means for the power structure at city hall, but it sure seems likely that it will be thrown into chaos. At least today's vile outrage was perpetrated by the Brooklyn Center police, so Frey doesn't actually have to account for anything, but obviously it's going to impact how everyone is thinking about the trial and the events of last summer.
How awful. Here is the NYT account.
Yeah, that seems like a pretty accurate account from what I've heard elsewhere.
Some other context is that Brooklyn Center is one of the inner-ring suburbs with a larger working-class Black population and a still mostly-white power structure. That leads to the usual types of conflict. One thing that gets elided is the way that a lot of the enforcement of the color line now happens outside city limits (at least the major cities). Suburban police departments crack a lot of heads, but it doesn't get reported on as much because each incident happens in a different suburb, and enough time goes by between them that it can be safely swept under the rug. Kobe Heisler and Philando Castile were also both shot by inner-ring suburban cops.
Here's a piece of more positive news: https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/04/07/a-salute-to-three-heroines-of-george-floyd-square/
114-116: I do not know what to say. I feel people trying to move back to normal, and I worry that normal will just mean "more of the same old same old."
He called his mother when he was stopped. "He said they pulled him over because he had air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror," she said. WTF?
