DrVax is now Make With Tech

[irvshapiro]

Folks, I am excited to announce that DrVax has begun the transition to Make With Tech. The Make With Tech brand better represents the goals and focus of our community. At Make With Tech, we help people learn how to use inexpensive desktop technologies to create, innovate, and make stuff. Over the past 3 years, the community has grown to tens of thousands of subscribers on YouTube, over a thousand registered users on this forum, and over 150 videos.

YouTube viewers have watched over 3 million videos. While these numbers are great I believe the topics we cover have much more potential and were limited by the DrVax community name which was not descriptive and was at times confused with the vaccination debate. Hence the name change.

Thank you for participating in the community and watching the Make With Tech YouTube videos.

[Ender5r]

OMG, I'm lost. I've been wandering around for hours trying to find DrVAX. I'm frantic. Somebody help!


LOL, the old tech adage is still true: the only constant is change.

[irvshapiro]

Ender5r I feel the same way. In addition, I did not realize how much HTML/CSS I had created for the overall community (drvax.com, forum..., etc.). I am going to be spending a couple of days editing and finding all of the links I need to change or redirect. If I do it correctly nothing will break for very long.

[Geit]

Wow, this is progress.

Too bad the shitty virus even effects something so different as a 3D printing channel and related forums.

So much work that could have been used for more useful stuff.

Thanks for keeping up the good work.

[marcdraco]

Don't blame the virus - blame the idiots like the extreme right-wing muscle men and some other buffoons (English people will know which of those I'm referring to). Blame people like (former) surgeon Andrew Wakefield, actors Jenny McCarthy, Charlie Sheen, "comedian" Rob Schneider and Jim Carry... Bill Maher and well, it's a long list.

THESE people are what created this mess. Every time British PM, Boris Johnson kept announcing the end to "another" lockdown, people went back to normal and cases rose while scientists and science writers (waves hand sheepishly) gave ourselves figurative traumatic brain injuries from banging our heads on the desk.

Blame all these people - but please, don't blame the virus.

Irv will always be Dr. Vax to me and I'm eternally grateful for his getting me started with thing like FreeCAD which I would have never considered.

EDIT: Here are 28 of those famous people including some I've mentioned - every one is a disgrace to humanity. https://living.alot.com/entertainmen...vaxxers--17218

[Geit]

EDIT: Here are 28 of those famous people including some I've mentioned - every one is a disgrace to humanity. https://living.alot.com/entertainmen...vaxxers--17218

Not to turn this into a political discussion, but at least several of the shown examples these statements are decades old. They all refer to flu, measles or other vaccinations and side effects of all sides of vaccinations. We all know there are risks of side effects. Every medication has a potential risk.

Corona, however, is a pandemic event. An outbreak which wasn't been seen in recent history.

And finally the page you refer to was last updated in July, 28 2019.

There wasn't even a glance of a pandemic event back then. So this date alone makes clear how out of scope your argument is. I am sure if you take more recent opinions from most, if not all these people you may get the opposite result. A vaccination against the flue or even the measles is not the same as against the corona virus and you take arguments from the first to the latter.

It is different to decide against a vaccination for the flu, which could be deadly but at a very low risk. And even the chances to get the flu are less present. You people usually don't get vaccination because the immune system can handle.

I did reject my flu vaccination, too. It was my decision. But since corona is different I will get my second vaccine shot tomorrow.

Corona is different. The risk is high, the spreading is fast and the death toll is gigantic. Here homes for old people had a year long wait list and after corona there isn't even a wait list.

So using peoples decision against a generic vaccine in the past to blame them today is highly unfair.

[Ender5r]

I tend to agree with Geit. I would not conflate influenza & CoVid-19. If you jump off a step 2 feet high, you're not likely to get injured. If you jump off one 200 feet high, well.....

marcdraco, I'm a little surprised. If you are a scientist (even a retired 1) I would not think you would make such a statement. Rigor & discipline in science are fundamental after all.

I can use myself as an example. I do not get the flu vaccine. However, I maintain my vitamin D at a high level (60-80 ng/ml, 150-200 nmol/L). I have done so for more than 10 years & I have had exactly 1 cold in all that time (it lasted 3 days only). Each year, people around me get colds & flu, but I do not. When it comes to CoVid-19, however, I am not relying on vitamin D's ability to maintain my immune system at a level that will stop the virus. To be sure, I do believe that vitamin D can greatly enhance my body's ability to fight the virus, but I got 2 doses of the Pfizer vaccine as an insurance policy. It's a matter of risk-benefit analysis. (For more on vitamin D & CoVid-19, have a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWXiyLIN4c4).

I agree with you about Jenny McCarthy, but not because of any flu shot aversion she might have. It's her aversion to the measles vaccine I object to. Her misguided belief that it causes autism is dangerous (even if it did cause autism, it would be at levels much lower than the damage, including death, caused by measles). I have experience in this area. As a child, I had, at different times, both Red & German measles. There are pictures of me covered head to toe in marks that look similar to smallpox. It was a "right of passage" for kids in my day, as was polio (luckily, I never got polio). Kids died from the complications of red measles. When it came to my kids, I was glad a vaccine had been developed, so they didn't have to go through that.

[marcdraco]

SARS-CoV-2 is a pandemic but only because we don't (or didn't) have an effective vaccine against it, but diseases we in the developed world take as uncommon or even rare such as measles are rife in less developed nations: but because they're poor brown people our media don't give a fig even if we do.

It's tough to keep this "apolitical" because the very people who should have kept us safe ignored the advice of the vast majority of scientists, infection diseases specialists, monitors, you name it. Johnson in the UK has famously been tagged for following "dates, not data" and he's done exactly the same again - the third time I think - to the cumulative hand waving of anyone with half an idea of how serious the Delta variant is (even infecting, hospitalising and killing people who have been double jabbed). Vaccines have made us safer but it seems we've learned nothing from the "Spanish" flu (1918) pandemic.

I've followed (and written about) anti-vaccination movement since the mid-1990s when Andrew Wakefield claimed a connection between MMR triple vaccine and autism - which has been debunked over and over and over... and yet still, Wakefield is a hero making a nice little living as a celebrity in America.

Lockdowns are tough and in today's connected world they're tougher than ever to enforce and yet, ironically, they are much easier to work around (by which I mean work from home, attend conferences by video, etc.)

Politically all major democracies should have prevented all but the most urgent cross-border movements from the get-go but that was considered political suicide and health of the world didn't even factor and by the time it was clear we we're up to our necks in **** it was already far too late. Yet as if they learned nothing, travel was still allowed from India to Europe and back long after the more contagious Delta variant was identified. To the best of my knowledge, it carries on now.

People were "encouraged" to wear masks and in some cases, that was a legal requirement but like the utter genius of our elected representatives, visors (which, to my recollection a Japanese team demonstrated early on were 100% useless) were still acceptable. How anyone thinks that a visor is going to filter our breath is beyond me - although they do stop particles entering the nose via the eye through the nasolacrimal duct, so there is that. Spectacles or googles will be as effective in this regard.

I understand your feelings about the people on that list of celebrities, but even IF they have changed their minds, which is entirely their own choice, they have already infected untold millions of their own followers with the idea that vaccines are bad and among those will be True Believers who create even more chaos.

Much the same thing applies to the Climate Change fiasco. I've known about this problem for something over 40 years (that I can recall) and probably heard mention of it prior to that. Scientists in the fields have been warning of this for longer still and yet we're amazingly slow to take any action and I suspect we're already a decade too late. At least life on Earth will revert to normal after we're gone, so there's that.

[marcdraco]

To clarify, science writer Ender5r. I talk to scientists and write (or I did) about their findings using words that the rest of us can understand but I haven't penned anything professional in a number of years. I would refer you to the post in that I did not conflate Influenza with SARS-CoV-2 that was a leap Geit made. I think because I pointed out that we're having such vaccine hesitancy in large part due to people like these. Of course, some people are worried that we've moved from live -> attenuated -> dead -> mRNA as a means of triggering an immune response. Not that mRNA vaccines are probably the future technology because of the way they work as opposed to the more traditional DNA-based ones.


Interesting that you mention poliomyelitis - a fascinating disease that had two competing vaccines: Salk's which I think was the main one used in the USA and Sabin's which was offered widely in Europe as I recall was attenuated and given by mouth - the same route as polio, an enterovirus, enters our bodies in the first place. A non-zero number of children went on to develop full-blown polio after receiving the Sabin vaccine. I was one of the majority of "lucky" ones. Like you I lived through measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox and a load of others suffering from several and bearing the scars to prove it.

To quote from the Wikipedia page on Polio Vaccines:

A misconception has been present in Pakistan that polio vaccine contained haram [forbidden] ingredients and could cause impotence and infertility in male children, leading some parents not to have their children vaccinated. This belief is most common in the Kyhber province and the FATA region. Attacks on polio vaccination teams have also occurred, thereby hampering international efforts to eradicate polio in Pakistan and globally.

Younger people are so used to not suffering from these diseases they have become conduits for the sort of anti-vaxx sentiment that these idiots spread and because they are emotionally "designed by nature" to think themselves invulnerable, they are less likely to take vaccines and take more risks as a direct result. Quite a few infamous American wannbe and actual politicians have bragged about this.

While we don't think of the flu as serious, it's actually a very deadly virus but we're sort of used to living with it now and many people do (incorrectly) conflate flu with the laundry list of coronaviruses and rhino viruses that cause cold symptoms. I've had flu twice and on both occasions it made me extremely ill with a recovery time measured in months. That was because, rather like many of the people who died in the 1918 epidemic, I was young with a highly developed immune system leading to a cytokine storm in both cases. The particular coronavirus that we're dealing with now also causes cytokine storms but primarily in older people and the obese (something to do with lipid cells producing excess amounts of cytokines, but this isn't really my wheelhouse so you'd have to take that with a dose of aspirin).

The last big influenza outbreak we had was Swine flu which nearly took my eldest daughter from us so please understand that I don't underestimate flu because I've seen it first hand. She survived only because she'd been vaccinated but still managed to catch a fairly serious case. Bird or avian "flu" is dangerous if it makes the zoonotic leap to humans but only does so occasionally because avian viruses live at slightly higher functional temperatures than those in humans an other mammals. But if one does evolve, birds spread it like wildfire which is why it's so dangerous.

Vitamin D is central to the functioning of a healthy immune system - which is why many countries as we move further up the globe supplement foods (milk being the main one) so that people get enough of the stuff because we're unable to make enough from sunlight. We are, after all, a species that "walked" out of Africa which isn't known for its short days and snowfall...

At least you know that Vitamin D is key and not the Vitamin C fallacy - which was largely a creation of Dr. Linus Pauling (who won two Nobel prizes!) and still got that badly wrong. However our immune system is far more complex than a single vitamin as research at (IIRC, King's College, London England) is now showing as they track Covid and look at how our gut microbiome affects our health - and not just our weight either.

All medicine is a risk-benefit balance - unless it's homeopathic and then it's (a) not medicine and (b) only works as a placebo so doesn't count.

Curiously, some scientists I've been following have claimed to identify an anti-parastic (which I won't name here for sake of keeping Irv's site free of crazy conspiracy theorists). This stuff, which is naturally occurring in much the same was as penicillin, is *claimed* to be effective both as a preventative (prophylactic) and as a treatment for all current strains of SARS-CoV-2 and it's out of patent, so seriously cheap. But should that be the case (I don't know but the circumstantial evidence appears strong, despite there being no double-blind trials yet) it would make a lot of politicians look very silly and put the drug companies on a huge back foot: the losses to Moderna and Pfizer would be almost incalculable.

As for lockdowns, I just saw in the news that the Delta variant, first found in India, is now accounting for fully 83% of new cases in the UK. It's only matter of time before that hits the continental USA in such numbers without strong interventions and serious personal responsibility! Our leaders can only do so much after all.

Stay healthy everyone and remember that Delta has already started to evade the vaccines, it's only a matter of time before that evolves into something far worse unless we all work to stop it.

I hope that clears any misconceptions, of course, if I've erred, I'm happy to be corrected. I'll have to un-sub from this because it's a hot-button topic that will devour far too much of my time. I'm not the world's fastest two-finger typist by any means!

[Geit]

To clarify, science writer Ender5r. I would refer you to the post in that I did not conflate Influenza with SARS-CoV-2 that was a leap Geit made.

I made the conclusion from your posted evidence link, which clearly is 100% non SARS-CoV-2 as it clearly predates the covid outbreak nearly a year. The statements itself used in that article are even older.

Ignoring the fact that these words where used without the knowing about Covid, you clearly compare the opinion of people on side effect of measles, polio or what not directly to Covid. You made it sound like the opinion of vaccination is set to stone for these people, because they have thoughts about that years before the pandemic. There people (at least when pointing on this article only) never said they won't get a Covid vaccination and you implied a false fact.

Changing your mind, when facts are changing, is not only common in science.

[Vassili Finellis]

WOW! I tried to find Dr VAX forum recently with no luck! Now i'm happy with the new name and the same forum!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ender5r]

marcdraco, if you watch the video I linked to, you will see how a sufficient level of vitamin D can effectively combat cytokine storms by helping the body regulate the level of angiotensin II (which causes cytokine production to increase). It does this by enabling the body to produce more ACE2 (angiotensin converting enzyme 2). The virus inactivates ACE2 as it enters cells. Increasing ACE2 reduces angiotensin II, thus reducing cytokine production & helping to avoid ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome). Cytokines are important in the body, but their levels have to be controlled.

[Ender5r]

Welcome back Vassili Finellis. You've been missed.

[Vassili Finellis]

Welcome back Vassili Finellis. You've been missed.

You too guys! I've so many things to do around 3d printing! Shortly, i'll post my new findings on MSLA printing systems!

[irvshapiro]

@marcdraco, Ender5r Guy, I think we should probably leave the medicine to another venue and stick to "maker" stuff here. P.S. I have always taken vitamin D and my levels are quite good. However, I had Covid and ended up on a ventilator for 8 days with a cytokine storm back in March 2020. So it appears there is no magic. That said time to go back to talking about "maker" stuff.