Guess Rona showed him!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/texas-republican-leader-dies-of-covid-19-five-days-after-anti-vaccination-post/ar-AAMYUrq?ocid=msedgntp
I've always wondered why the "thoughts and prayers" crowd don't assume the vaccine is an answer to their prayers. I feel bad for his wife and kid, but I don't feel bad that he no longer has an opportunity to continue spreading misinformation.
There's been nothing BUT misinformation, since day one, from all sides. It only varies by degree and intent. Salon magazine - no conservative bastion, that - reported that Anthony Fauci really believed and advised that masks would not be helpful in the early days. We won't get into the Chinese disinformation and all the insistence that the US wasn't funding gain-of-function research in China. Even the epidemiologists I work with know the Wuhan institute was doing gain-of-function research. And breakthrough infections are now happening at an alarming rate. Not that I'm an anti-vaxxer by any stretch of the word. But they're happening, and the fact is no one really has any accurate idea yet how effective the vaccine is going to be nor for how long. It's ALL hopes and prayers.
Let me just answer to that last part...part of a "discussion" I've been having with my brother. While people like to say corners were cut with development of these vaccines with Operation Warp speed, actually nothing different was done with these than with any other drug or vaccine. The primary reasons these were approved so quickly is that 1) money was made available to the companies (Pfizer didn't accept it) so that they could avoid the risk of doing phase 1, 2 and three studies at the same time, and 2), possibly the Major part of Warp Speed was that the red tape and slowness of FDA review was drastically shortened. Again not changed, they just didn't take their sweet ass time getting around to it. [due to the high cost, they usually do phase 1, submit data and wait a year or more for FDA review, then start phase 2, another year plus FDA review, then phase 3. With this taking 5 years or more, companies can get all the data on long term stability, immunologic data from which they can determine if and when boosters are needed etc.] So they did everything to prove safety and efficacy, but it is not possible to know need and frequency of boosters as only about a year has passed now from the start of the initial studies. ( I'm still periodically getting blood drawn as part of the Moderna study)
I don't remotely disagree with any that. Like I said, I'm not an anti-vaxxer.
But it's also true that we don't have hard data on how long immunity - vaccine-generated or infection-generated - will last, nor how effective the vaccines will prove to be against the variants. Assertions that vaccines are useless is misinformation, but so are assertions that vaccines will keep anyone from getting sick. The best we can say is "they will keep some people, likely most, from getting sick with existing strains, they may prove to be effective for some, likely most, against variants, and they will reduce the severity for some, likely most." That's all we can say with any certainty about any vaccine. There were something like 350 cases last year - mostly in Asia - of polio infections owing to vaccination. That doesn't mean polio vaccination is useless. It only means that no vaccine is a sure thing. And anyone who says otherwise is spreading misinformation, even if they don't intend to, every bit as much as those who assert that vaccines don't work.
Also, there is a difference between misinformation and disinformation. All disinformation is misinformation, but not all misinformation is disinformation. Those who assert that the COVID vaccine is a government plot to reduce the population are engaging in disinformation. ;-)
