sinovac

it's important for my millions of imaginary followers to know my recent activities because the world revolves around me. last week i signed up for vaccination and realized i am the very bottom of the priority list as you can seen in photo 1 of the collage. this week i was rounding up my elderly relatives around the city to have them vaccinated. while eating my super healthy breakfast (oatmeal, avocado and mango) and listening to my favorite shows (democracy now, jimmy dore and ben shapiro) at the waiting tent for the chaperones of the elderly, mayor rama approached me and asked if my dad is being vaccinated. i told him my dad is in the states. then a moth landed on my foot. i tried to free it at the dragon boat racing course nearby but it refuses to fly away. it stayed on my foot anywhere i went the entire day - while i was driving my tita doris home and in western union. when i got home i took off my shoes and it finally flew and stayed on the curtain. 

i also tried to convince my elderly neighbors to get vaccinated but they told me sinovac is n*t ef*ect*ve because it comes from ch*n* (i hope the efbee AI won't misinterpret this post and suspend my account). i told them sinovac should be the best vaccine because ch*na is very good at making something that is broken and a vaccine is basically a virus that is broken and and it's purpose is to trigger your antibodies to multiply and strengthen. i made an analogy of the coronavirus as a foreign army doing a SURPRISE invasion in the philippines. the philippines can easily defeat the invading army if given enough time to prepare. but in a surprise attack, the invading army could sometimes succeed. the vaccine is like an army invading the philippines where the arms of it's soldiers are amputated. it will trigger a mobilization and national draft that would easily defeat the invading army because their soldiers don't have arms. then when a real invading army with arms arrive, the philippine army is already prepared to defeat that army. 

to my more educated followers who has the faculty to grasp statistical concepts but are still hesitant to get vaccinated by sinovac, keep in mind sinovac has been well tested on millions of people across dozens of countries since january 2021 and is proven to prevent deaths and hospitalization practically 100% of the time. if you don't trust ch*n* there's no reason for you to not trust the data coming from dozens of countries. 

it's as if we are already at stage 100 of clinical trials and sinovac continues to prevent deaths and hospitalization 100% of the time. imagine just passing stage 4 of a clinical trial is already considered a tremendous achievement. clinical trials are so complicated and very expensive and reaching stage 4 is already a super amazing feat. but it's the only way to prove if a vaccine or medicine is effective. because the fatality rate of covid is very low, it's very very very possible for 10 covid patients to drink their urine and still recover. you can't say drinking urine cures covid. search "ian's knowledge bombs" and click "faith-in-tuob" in the table of contents to learn more about this very important statistical concept. 

but there are times when your only option is to use common sense logic and anecdotal evidence. example, it may be a while before i can get vaccinated because i am in the lowest priority category. i am asthmatic but i have no proof i am asthmatic because long time ago i figured out a way to manage my asthma using natural means. so the best option for me right now is garlic therapy. just because a medicine or therapy is not proven to be effective by clinical trials, does not mean there is no possibility it won't work. 

example, keeping a tiny nugget of garlic in my mouth prevents me from getting sinusitis/soar throat/fever/asthma. i've experimented on this hundreds of times. i also experimented on not putting garlic on my mouth when i start to show symptoms and i got bed ridden for 2 weeks. i can scientifically say that garlic prevents me from getting sinusitis/soar throat/fever/asthma. for more info about my garlic therapy, which by the way has a scientific basis because garlic does kill bacteria and viruses, read my article https://ian-crystal.blogspot.com/2018/08/i-just-won-a-billion-dollars.html

but i can't say it works on other people. i cannot also say it works for covid because i never had covid before. for me to say "garlic therapy scientifically prevents ME from getting covid", i have to get tested and proven positive for covid, do garlic therapy and not get severe symptoms. this has to happen at least 10 times. then i have to get tested and proven positive for covid again at least 10 times, and during those 10 times, i won't do garlic therapy and get severe symptoms or become hospitalized. that's that only time i can say garlic therapy works for me. but even then, i can't say it works for other people (excuse me for sounding like ben shapiro).

it makes me furios when experts say a vaccine is 67% effective or 85% effective. during typhoon yolanda the experts were warning people that a storm surge is approaching. i was waitlisted in stanford, UP diliman and ateneo so i consider myself well educated yet at that time even i had no clue what was a storm surge. i thought it was just a surge of heavy rain falling from the sky or a very strong wind. i'm sure the uneducated masses were also thinking the same thing. if the experts said a tsunami was approaching, more people would have run to higher ground and more lives would have been saved. people already know what is a tsunami because it claimed 230 thousand lives a few years earlier. our objective is not to be correct. our objective is to save lives. so we should never say a vaccine 67% effective in preventing infection because that is a very MISLEADING AND USELESS INFORMATION. instead say:

________ vaccine is practically 100% effective in preventing hospitalization and death.

who am i to criticize these experts when i'm not even smart enough to become a lawyer or doctor and i didn't even get accepted to ateneo or UP diliman? karl marx was a brilliant academic and super intellectual yet his ideas caused the deaths and suffering to millions. it also took decades for experts to give official warnings on the hazards of smoking and softdrinks even if the evidence was already obvious for quite some time. the moral of the story is to avoid being a right wing ideologue or left wing ideologue. the best thing to do is be pragmatic and treat everything as a case by case basis. if you want icecream for your brain, watch CNN and fox news. if you want meat for you brain, read chomsky. if you want vegetables for your brain, search "ian's knowledge bombs" on the web and click "politics-for-dummies" in the table of contents.

----------- update 4 days later: 

praise the lord i finally got my first dose. it will still take around 12 days before i start to get partial protection and i won't get full and long lasting protection until i get the second dose on aug 31. i got sinovac and although all vaccines are all very effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths, even if i had a choice i still prefer sinovac over mRNA technologies such as pfizer and moderna. sinovac contains inactivated coronavirus particles and this method of using dead pathogens in vacccines has been around for more than a hundred years so it's been tried and tested. 

on the other hand this is the first time a medicine that uses mRNA has been approved. mRNA technology has been on my radar for the past few years as treatment for cancer and i'm excited that the covid vaccines of pfizer and moderna have at least proven mRNA is safe to use in millions of humans and has a high efficacy. 

the other promising cancer treatment tech i've been following, CAR T-cell therapy recently got denied FDA approval after patients participating in the trials were having severe adverse reactions. 4 years ago i was pissed that my only pure play CAR T-cell stock kite pharma got bought by gilead. i hate it when my pure play stock gets bought out by a giant that's too big for my pure play to move the needle (that's why i feel sad because the last pure play for programmable chips xilinx will soon be bought by AMD). but turns out it was a blessing in disguise kite got bought by GILD because i would have lost lots of money. i thought CAR T-cell was the panacea cure for cancer. 

it's actually very cool how CAR T-cell therapy works. the immune system recognizes foreign substances in the body by finding proteins called antigens on the surface of those cells. immune cells called T cells have their own proteins called receptors that attach to foreign antigens and help trigger other parts of the immune system to destroy the foreign substance. the relationship between antigens and immune receptors is like a lock and key. just as a lock can only be opened with the right key, each foreign antigen has a unique immune receptor that is able to bind to it. cancer cells also have antigens, but if your immune cells don't have the right receptors, they can't attach to the antigens and help destroy the cancer cells. in CAR T-cell therapies, T cells are taken from the patient's blood and are changed in the lab by adding a gene for a man-made receptor (called a chimeric antigen receptor or CAR). the CAR T-cells are then given back to the patient. it's been proven to be an effective treatment against leukemia. 

the problem is that sometimes the CAR T-cells causes a cytokine storm, just like in a covid-19 patient. actually unlike cancer cells that actually damages a person's body, CAR T-cells and the covid-19 virus are suppose to be harmless to the body. it's the severe immune response called cytokine storm that makes the person severely ill or die. actually an immune response like fever is suppose to be beneficial to the body because it kills the harmful virus or bacteria. most bacteria and viruses do well when your body is at your normal temperature. but if you have a fever, it is harder for them to survive. the problem is when the immune response such as the cytokine storm is too severe it not only kills the virus but also kills the body. i hope they find a workaround to the CAR T-cell problem. 

luckily, mRNA is giving us a glimmer of hope. the way mRNA vaccine works for cancer is to alert the immune system to the tumor so the immune system will attack it. it’s basically biological software. a sample of tissue is taken from a patient’s tumor and their DNA is analyzed to identify mutations that distinguish the cancer cells from the normal, healthy cells. computers compare the two DNA samples to identify the unique mutations in a tumor, then the results are used to design a molecule of mRNA that will go into the vaccine. after the mRNA vaccine is injected into the patient, the mRNA tells the patient’s cells to produce proteins that are associated with the specific mutations on their tumor. the tumor protein fragments that are created from the mRNA are then recognized by the patient’s immune system.  basically, the mRNA instructions train the immune system’s T cells to recognize mutations in cancer cells and attack only those. the immune system scours the body on a search-and-destroy mission looking for similar tumor cells. also, one of the things cancer does is it can turn on signals to tell the immune system to quiet down so the cancer is not detected. the goal of an mRNA vaccine is to alert and gear up the immune system to go after the characteristic features of tumor cells and attack them. mRNA cancer vaccines wake up specialized killer T cells that recognize abnormal cells and trigger them to kill the cells that are cancer. it uses our own immune system as the army to eliminate the cancer. very cool !!!

i received the text for my vaccination at 12:10 pm and my schedule was at 2pm. i think the reason why i was given high priority was because i indicated in the application that i had asthma which is a comorbidity. the text indicated i had to bring proof of having a comorbidity. unfortunately, in the last 2 years i've been using natural therapies to treat asthma so i have no prescription or proof i'm asthmatic. luckily, my high school classmate messaged me a medical certificate even at very short notice. 

when i got to the vaccination center, i realized i haven't had lunch and i was very hungry. hunger is one of my asthma triggers. last week i was playing golf in alta vista i almost had an asthma attack because i forgot they closed the snack bar at the 15th hole and i was already starving. good thing we only had 3 holes left. i know the vaccination process can take 3 hours because i was chaperoning my elderly relatives to vaccination centers last week. but the vaccination center i was assigned to was in a pretty remote area and there was no place nearby to buy food. i went to the condo complex citi de mare nearby hoping they have a 7-11 but there was none. then i thought the newly built campus of my alma matter just across the vaccination center should have a canteen but it was closed. there was like a food street across the freeway in il corso and i was tempted to do a spiderman maneuver and cross the freeway when there is a lull in traffic but there were too many speeding vehicles. if i drive my car to il corso then i would be late for my scheduled appointment because the freeway exits on both sides were too far away. luckily i found road construction workers in orange uniform so i asked if any of them brought lunch i will buy it for P500. they regretted they did not bring lunch and told me there is a hidden makeshift eatery deep in the forest. when i got there they ran out of cooked food but luckily they had instant noodles and canned tuna so i was saved. 

nice to know UP SRP also has it's own "black gate". i have zero memories of black gate in the gorordo campus because i never had money to buy food back then because our house was just walking distance. it's only now 34 years later that i'm starting my own black gate memories in the new UP campus in SRP. 

the vaccination went smoothly i'm so impressed at our city government. it took 3 hours but i was able to do lots of productive work on my laptop. afterwards, while walking towards my car, i stopped by for a long and intense celbratory pee in the dragon boat racing course.

for those asking i did not just sign up online for vaccination. i also went to the vaccination sites and signed up on their sign up sheets so we do  not know if i got selected from my online sign up or the physical sign up sheet of the vaccinations sites. what i'm trying to say is it's better if you also sign up on all the vaccination sites, not just online. and if you really want to optimize your chances, i also dropped by the vaccination sites once a week and asked the guard at the entrance if there is a chance they will accept walkins that day or that week. because i heard sometimes they do accept walk-ins

(for more of my knowledge bombs, click the "ian's knowledge bombs" banner at the top of this article and choose any article in the table of contents that piques your interest)