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Qualifying for COVID vaccine solely on BMI

13

Replies

  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,937 Member
    NannMC wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    NannMC wrote: »
    I think you should take the vaccine whenever you can. It can sound selfish, but actually each person who has it is one less to potentially burden an ICU and one less to pass it on to someone else, so it's actually rather selfless. (Just like taking other precautions, such as wearing a mask.)

    I just want to pass this on since a couple of people have said otherwise:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a person who is vaccinated against COVID-19 can still be infected with or “carry” the virus that causes COVID-19 while not feeling sick or having symptoms. Experts call this “asymptomatic infection.”Mar 5, 2021

    Your immune system isn't a force field preventing the virus from entering your body in the first place, so if you're exposed, some virus will get into your system, so you would be "carrying" some virus. But your immune system after you're vaccinated goes after the virus when it gets into your body, and blocks it as much as possible from getting inside of cells and multiplying. Therefore you would develop a much smaller viral load if at all.

    I've seen the excitement in a person's eyes over the ability to visit vulnerable loved ones because of the vaccine, so it worries me. If there's a chance of transmitting the virus even after being vaccinated, people should know so they can make an informed decision. That's my only motivation here.

    Just learn how to read CDC statements, is all.

    You realize this vaccine program is only a few months in, right? It's not like they can purposely try to infect people to see what happens. Vaccinated people are going to be the way out of this. If you don't believe that, then just stay away from the rest of the population. No one is making you get vaccinated.
  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
    I think it's pretty clear that right now the CDC is erring on the side of caution with their advice for vaccinated people.

    From their own statement:

    "We’re still learning how well COVID-19 vaccines keep people from spreading the disease.
    Early data show that the vaccines may help keep people from spreading COVID-19, but we are learning more as more people get vaccinated."

    https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vaccinated.html

    That's why they're advising fully vaccinated people to still be cautious about the potential for transmission, because we don't have the data.
  • middlehaitch
    middlehaitch Posts: 8,483 Member
    NannMC wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    NannMC wrote: »
    I think you should take the vaccine whenever you can. It can sound selfish, but actually each person who has it is one less to potentially burden an ICU and one less to pass it on to someone else, so it's actually rather selfless. (Just like taking other precautions, such as wearing a mask.)

    I just want to pass this on since a couple of people have said otherwise:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a person who is vaccinated against COVID-19 can still be infected with or “carry” the virus that causes COVID-19 while not feeling sick or having symptoms. Experts call this “asymptomatic infection.”Mar 5, 2021

    Your immune system isn't a force field preventing the virus from entering your body in the first place, so if you're exposed, some virus will get into your system, so you would be "carrying" some virus. But your immune system after you're vaccinated goes after the virus when it gets into your body, and blocks it as much as possible from getting inside of cells and multiplying. Therefore you would develop a much smaller viral load if at all.

    I've seen the excitement in a person's eyes over the ability to visit vulnerable loved ones because of the vaccine, so it worries me. If there's a chance of transmitting the virus even after being vaccinated, people should know so they can make an informed decision. That's my only motivation here.

    Just learn how to read CDC statements, is all.

    You realize this vaccine program is only a few months in, right? It's not like they can purposely try to infect people to see what happens. Vaccinated people are going to be the way out of this. If you don't believe that, then just stay away from the rest of the population. No one is making you get vaccinated.

    Re the bolded:-

    Challenge Trials (purposefully vaccining then infecting) have been proposed for a couple of the vaccines.

    The UK proposed one for the O-AZ using younger healthy adults. It got approved by the ethics committee, but I don’t know if it went forward. It was/is due to start sometime around this month.

    Cheers, h.
  • 33gail33
    33gail33 Posts: 1,155 Member
    edited March 2021
    NannMC wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    NannMC wrote: »
    I think you should take the vaccine whenever you can. It can sound selfish, but actually each person who has it is one less to potentially burden an ICU and one less to pass it on to someone else, so it's actually rather selfless. (Just like taking other precautions, such as wearing a mask.)

    I just want to pass this on since a couple of people have said otherwise:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a person who is vaccinated against COVID-19 can still be infected with or “carry” the virus that causes COVID-19 while not feeling sick or having symptoms. Experts call this “asymptomatic infection.”Mar 5, 2021

    Your immune system isn't a force field preventing the virus from entering your body in the first place, so if you're exposed, some virus will get into your system, so you would be "carrying" some virus. But your immune system after you're vaccinated goes after the virus when it gets into your body, and blocks it as much as possible from getting inside of cells and multiplying. Therefore you would develop a much smaller viral load if at all.

    I've seen the excitement in a person's eyes over the ability to visit vulnerable loved ones because of the vaccine, so it worries me. If there's a chance of transmitting the virus even after being vaccinated, people should know so they can make an informed decision. That's my only motivation here.

    I get what you are saying, my take on it is if my Mom is vaccinated, and I also am vaccinated, then the already small risk of one of us dying of COVID (without vaccines) has been made that much smaller, to where it is almost negligible. Something like that is a risk that I am willing to take after a year of this, we can't eliminate every possible risk in life.
    And with most vaccines even if you can still transmit and/or catch the virus the illness is much milder - so that is also something I would take into consideration.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,937 Member
    edited March 2021
    NannMC wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    NannMC wrote: »
    I think you should take the vaccine whenever you can. It can sound selfish, but actually each person who has it is one less to potentially burden an ICU and one less to pass it on to someone else, so it's actually rather selfless. (Just like taking other precautions, such as wearing a mask.)

    I just want to pass this on since a couple of people have said otherwise:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a person who is vaccinated against COVID-19 can still be infected with or “carry” the virus that causes COVID-19 while not feeling sick or having symptoms. Experts call this “asymptomatic infection.”Mar 5, 2021

    Your immune system isn't a force field preventing the virus from entering your body in the first place, so if you're exposed, some virus will get into your system, so you would be "carrying" some virus. But your immune system after you're vaccinated goes after the virus when it gets into your body, and blocks it as much as possible from getting inside of cells and multiplying. Therefore you would develop a much smaller viral load if at all.

    I've seen the excitement in a person's eyes over the ability to visit vulnerable loved ones because of the vaccine, so it worries me. If there's a chance of transmitting the virus even after being vaccinated, people should know so they can make an informed decision. That's my only motivation here.

    Just learn how to read CDC statements, is all.

    You realize this vaccine program is only a few months in, right? It's not like they can purposely try to infect people to see what happens. Vaccinated people are going to be the way out of this. If you don't believe that, then just stay away from the rest of the population. No one is making you get vaccinated.

    Re the bolded:-

    Challenge Trials (purposefully vaccining then infecting) have been proposed for a couple of the vaccines.

    The UK proposed one for the O-AZ using younger healthy adults. It got approved by the ethics committee, but I don’t know if it went forward. It was/is due to start sometime around this month.

    Cheers, h.

    Weirdly interesting.


    The point being - right now, no one knows exactly how much the vaccine will stop the vaccinated from transmitting - and it seems a difficult if not impossible task to study. With that said, someone will study it. :lol:

    All of this is one big giant experiment right now. Science! History! Statistics! Infectious disease! So interesting.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    33gail33 wrote: »
    NannMC wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    NannMC wrote: »
    I think you should take the vaccine whenever you can. It can sound selfish, but actually each person who has it is one less to potentially burden an ICU and one less to pass it on to someone else, so it's actually rather selfless. (Just like taking other precautions, such as wearing a mask.)

    I just want to pass this on since a couple of people have said otherwise:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a person who is vaccinated against COVID-19 can still be infected with or “carry” the virus that causes COVID-19 while not feeling sick or having symptoms. Experts call this “asymptomatic infection.”Mar 5, 2021

    Your immune system isn't a force field preventing the virus from entering your body in the first place, so if you're exposed, some virus will get into your system, so you would be "carrying" some virus. But your immune system after you're vaccinated goes after the virus when it gets into your body, and blocks it as much as possible from getting inside of cells and multiplying. Therefore you would develop a much smaller viral load if at all.

    I've seen the excitement in a person's eyes over the ability to visit vulnerable loved ones because of the vaccine, so it worries me. If there's a chance of transmitting the virus even after being vaccinated, people should know so they can make an informed decision. That's my only motivation here.

    I get what you are saying, my take on it is if my Mom is vaccinated, and I also am vaccinated, then the already small risk of one of us dying of COVID (without vaccines) has been made that much smaller, to where it is almost negligible. Something like that is a risk that I am willing to take after a year of this, we can't eliminate every possible risk in life.

    I can't see anyone seriously disagreeing with this.

    The concern would be if we were vaccinating younger people and not older people and telling them to go visit older relatives without masks and distancing and so on, but of course that is not happening. Generally, older people are being vaccinated first (but for people in the medical field who were in the first wave), and people aren't being told to disregard any precautions when interacting with unvaccinated people. At least, that's what I see where I am. Of course, it will be even better when most of the population is vaccinated.
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,970 Member
    NannMC wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    NannMC wrote: »
    I think you should take the vaccine whenever you can. It can sound selfish, but actually each person who has it is one less to potentially burden an ICU and one less to pass it on to someone else, so it's actually rather selfless. (Just like taking other precautions, such as wearing a mask.)

    I just want to pass this on since a couple of people have said otherwise:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a person who is vaccinated against COVID-19 can still be infected with or “carry” the virus that causes COVID-19 while not feeling sick or having symptoms. Experts call this “asymptomatic infection.”Mar 5, 2021

    Your immune system isn't a force field preventing the virus from entering your body in the first place, so if you're exposed, some virus will get into your system, so you would be "carrying" some virus. But your immune system after you're vaccinated goes after the virus when it gets into your body, and blocks it as much as possible from getting inside of cells and multiplying. Therefore you would develop a much smaller viral load if at all.

    I've seen the excitement in a person's eyes over the ability to visit vulnerable loved ones because of the vaccine, so it worries me. If there's a chance of transmitting the virus even after being vaccinated, people should know so they can make an informed decision. That's my only motivation here.

    Just learn how to read CDC statements, is all.

    You realize this vaccine program is only a few months in, right? It's not like they can purposely try to infect people to see what happens. Vaccinated people are going to be the way out of this. If you don't believe that, then just stay away from the rest of the population. No one is making you get vaccinated.

    Re the bolded:-

    Challenge Trials (purposefully vaccining then infecting) have been proposed for a couple of the vaccines.

    The UK proposed one for the O-AZ using younger healthy adults. It got approved by the ethics committee, but I don’t know if it went forward. It was/is due to start sometime around this month.

    Cheers, h.

    Weirdly interesting.


    The point being - right now, no one knows exactly how much the vaccine will stop the vaccinated from transmitting - and it seems a difficult if not impossible task to study. With that said, someone will study it. :lol:

    All of this is one big giant experiment right now. Science! History! Statistics! Infectious disease! So interesting.

    I can attest to the thing about challenge trials, I was following that too, but it fell off my radar. If you find this interesting, read more about SARS 1 when you have time. They developed what they hoped would be a vaccine and it showed promise in the lab, but the virus mysteriously disappeared so the large scale "in the wild" testing that challenge trials are intended to shortcut, never happened it became impossible.
  • freda666
    freda666 Posts: 338 Member
    NannMC wrote: »
    lkpducky wrote: »
    NannMC wrote: »
    I think you should take the vaccine whenever you can. It can sound selfish, but actually each person who has it is one less to potentially burden an ICU and one less to pass it on to someone else, so it's actually rather selfless. (Just like taking other precautions, such as wearing a mask.)

    I just want to pass this on since a couple of people have said otherwise:

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a person who is vaccinated against COVID-19 can still be infected with or “carry” the virus that causes COVID-19 while not feeling sick or having symptoms. Experts call this “asymptomatic infection.”Mar 5, 2021

    Your immune system isn't a force field preventing the virus from entering your body in the first place, so if you're exposed, some virus will get into your system, so you would be "carrying" some virus. But your immune system after you're vaccinated goes after the virus when it gets into your body, and blocks it as much as possible from getting inside of cells and multiplying. Therefore you would develop a much smaller viral load if at all.

    I've seen the excitement in a person's eyes over the ability to visit vulnerable loved ones because of the vaccine, so it worries me. If there's a chance of transmitting the virus even after being vaccinated, people should know so they can make an informed decision. That's my only motivation here.

    We cannot eliminate all risk but being vaccinated reduces it to a level most of us (I believe) are prepared to accept in exchange for a 'normal' life again.
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 8,977 Member
    edited March 2021
    Eligibility on a bmi of 26 does seem rather strange to me - might as well just be open to all at that point.

    Because bmi of 26 is so close to healthy bmi ( indeed is healthy bmi for some people, like young active males) that it seems a pointless criteria.

    Here in South Australia we will be moving to phase b next week
    Phase a was frontline health workers, quarantine and international airport workers, staff and residents of aged care and disability homes.

    Phase b - all other health workers, anyone over 70,aboriginal people over 50, people with serious chronic health conditions ( there is specific list of these) and bmi over 40.
  • pfeiferlindsey
    pfeiferlindsey Posts: 163 Member
    Quick update...

    Our state is opening up vaccines to everyone starting May 1. I did opt to make an appointment based on the eligibility and will be receiving my first dose on April 11. I waffled back and forth, but ultimately, if I'm eligible based on the criteria, I'm going to get it. I'm guessing things will get crazy when it's opened up for all.
  • Ryckychen
    Ryckychen Posts: 1 Member
    I would like to add that the fact that these people are obese isn`t necessarily the only reaso why they get the vaccine. Having a higher BMI does most time come along with having other health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes (quite a lot people are not diagnosed because the symptoms didn´t show up) and the additional body weight can make them have problems breathing.
  • ahoy_m8
    ahoy_m8 Posts: 3,052 Member
    I think you should take the vaccine whenever you can. It can sound selfish, but actually each person who has it is one less to potentially burden an ICU and one less to pass it on to someone else, so it's actually rather selfless. (Just like taking other precautions, such as wearing a mask.)

    I agree with this. An analogous situation was early on when administrative hospital workers were offered vaccine along with health care workers. Getting 300M people vaccinated (twice for the earliest vaccine brands) is a big task. The people organizing that task have access to more information to make those decisions than the average Joe like me. Average Joes should not rethink those decisions. Better to be a part of the solution by just getting the shot promptly when powers-that-be decide it’s time for you.
  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 873 Member
    I'm sure that the people making the decisions for 'who's next' for the vaccine aren't the people who SHOULD be making that decision (as is often the case when things are politicized)...but the decision for who should be next to get it should prioritize the load on our healthcare services.

    So, the first people who get the vaccine should be the people who would be most likely to need hospitalization or intense treatment. Then next, so on and so on. I assume that BMI got put on there because there was a correlation between BMI and hospitalization.

    The issue was having too many people needing hospital services - and not having enough beds, equipment or hospital staff to help them and having deaths that could have been avoided due to that.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    edited May 2021
    Doesn't seem relevant to a discussion of vaccines.

    Why do you think the vaccine is more risky than getting covid or future covid mutations?
  • singingflutelady
    singingflutelady Posts: 8,736 Member
    Well it's certainly your right not to take any drugs or vaccine (not a drug btw) and how a previous experience has changed your life but not also not doing those things is risking your life too unless you live somewhere were covid isn't a problem anymore.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,885 Member
    The topic of this thread is whether it's fair to qualify for the vaccine based on BMI, and that seems moot since I believe it's open to anyone at this point (it certainly is in my state). It is not a thread for anti vaxx debate. There was such a thread, maybe it still exists, don't remember.
  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    The topic of this thread is whether it's fair to qualify for the vaccine based on BMI, and that seems moot since I believe it's open to anyone at this point (it certainly is in my state). It is not a thread for anti vaxx debate. There was such a thread, maybe it still exists, don't remember.

    There was, but it's no longer with us.
  • ccrdragon
    ccrdragon Posts: 3,365 Member
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    The topic of this thread is whether it's fair to qualify for the vaccine based on BMI, and that seems moot since I believe it's open to anyone at this point (it certainly is in my state). It is not a thread for anti vaxx debate. There was such a thread, maybe it still exists, don't remember.

    It got somewhat heated and the mods nuked it...