You lost the moment you has to used the term "full vaccination".
Your data is trash.
The term "fully vaccinated" means there is about an eight week window where you could get covid, die from it, after getting the shot, and still be counted in the unvaccinated group.
Bayesian data crime.
There is no such thing as fully or partially vaccinated. These time lines were created to hide negative side effects and rig safety and efficacy figures.
What soured me on anti-vaxxerism (not that I was ever partial to it - I was one of the early testers of Sputnik) is that a lot of its most active proponents are... psychotic demented nutjobs.
Over the entirety of my blogging career I received more threats over COVID vaccines than everything else (Ukraine war included) to date. The topic really makes Nazis mad.
Also while I didn't put the dots together then, the Russian state's response to COVID (achieving the industrialized world's second highest mortality after Bulgaria, despite having developed an actually quite effective vaccine) was telling as to its real level of state capacity and Putin's leadership qualities.
You can’t separate the antivax sentiments from the lockdowns. All of the lies around that, the riots, etc. is what destroyed the credibility of the mainstream media and set the stage for the antivax movement
I think anti-vaxers might be one of the most dangerous groups in the world. If there’s another novel pandemic, the world is going to rely on the USA’s top-notch research establishment to produce another vaccine. Any group that wants to unjustly delay or halt development would be contributing to the deaths of millions across the world. Perhaps a future pandemic may be deadly enough to make anti-vax beyond the pale, but that’s cold comfort to people who died due to unnecessary delays.
You are careful to separate the schools of thought on the "anti-vax" side. I appreciate that.
Nevertheless there are liars and idiots on both sides. I don't even need to click the links to know that there are rebuttals to all your studies and statistics that you cite. Which is correct? I don't know.
Maybe that's how it's always been for a lot of topics, and the pandemic has just recently brought it to light. In the absence of certainty, though, I'm going to refrain from annual booster shots for a disease which was little more than an unpleasant cold when I got it (post-JNJ-vax).
You betray your certainty on the issue (seemingly an intentional and discrediting addition) by revealing that you're not "up to date" on boosters. Not just not-up-to-date, but you know less about your own vax status than about the headlines surrounding the topic.
The fact is older Americans who are generally more conservative did not buy into anti-vaxx conspiracy theories. According to data collected by the states, 95.0% of Americans above the age of 65 took atleast 2 doses of vaccine.
My parents and my in laws took the vaccine as they are older. My wife and I took the vaccine as well as we are in our late 40s. However, our oldest son who was is in high school did not take the vaccine as he is young and healthy and we were concerned about myocarditis risk outweighing benefits of covid vaccine.
The data on vaccination shows Americans understand the science better. Older Americans overwhelmingly took the vaccine as they were in the high risk category. Even when it comes to new bi-valent booster, only 18% of adults have taken it given covid is now not a risky disease anymore but 50% of seniors have taken it. Normal people understand the risks and benefits better. If you are obese, unhealthy or old, the vaccine saved lives.
An impressive compilation of Liberaltarian greatest hits. Let's review:
1) Tens of millions of people being denied basic human rights, like the right to seek employment or go to a restaurant, because they refuse to take a medical product is actually a minor infringement on liberty. The important infringements on liberty are those that make it harder for large corporations to make money.
2) If a large corporation is engaging in unethical business practices, it shouldn't be stopped because it's more important just to be pro market, and the market means that large corporations can do whatever they want.
3) If a government action causes harm, those to blame are those who opposed the government action, because if they hadn't have opposed it, it wouldn't have caused so much harm.
Finally, it is acknowledged around the world that MRNA vaccines are trash. Countries are trying and failing to literally give away for free hundreds of millions of doses and they can't. They are paying Pfizer to stop sending them any more of this crappy product. Only provincial Americans still think this is a good product.
The charts comparing Trump to Biden area deaths inverts well before the vaccine hitting the market. The more likely explanation is that Biden won urban areas, which were hit by Covid earlier, and Trump areas are generally less populated, older and less healthy, meaning that Covid hit them later and did more damage.
The "we undercounted Covid deaths" assumes that all excess deaths were due to Covid. But, it was well documented how millions of people did not get cancer screens, normal physicals, etc, and also were less likely to go to the doctor or hospital if something felt a little off.
The unvaccinated vs vaccinated death rates is based off of a 2600 person data set, selected in who knows how, where there is no information on how vaccination status was determined.
Edit: I forgot to mention the chart of all the vaccine trials. Did you even look at the error bars, which were over 100% in many of the studies?
Almost completely disagree with you on all points. Mostly because I myself have a bona fide vaccine injury and I have witnessed many medical problems in people I personally know and very little medical improvement from anyone that was Covid vaccinated. I guess you haven’t looked at the life and disability claims from 2021-23. Many people agree with me, even ones that would rather not see this.
If you're trying to find the origin of right wing anti-vax crazies, there are multiple stories you could tell. You might blame rational opposition to government overreach on lockdowns and masks spilling over into irrational opposition to Warp Speed. You could direct the majority of your ire towards long standing anti-vax activists who spent decades spreading lies about measles vaccines causing autism, like RFK. But in this article you've chosen to go after people trying to explicate nuanced truths regarding e.g. natural immunity vs vaccine immunity, or cost/benefit for young men to take 3rd or 4th booster doses.
One of the signs that America has a dysfunctional health bureaucracy even relative to other countries is failure to tell the truth on nuanced issues like this. Other countries had no problem accounting for natural immunity in their vaccine requirements (e.g. France). Denmark already has long since retired their vaccination program for anyone under 50 without special health conditions. Meanwhile the CDC was mostly in denial that natural immunity was as effective as vaccination, and continues to recommend repeated Covid vaccination to young boys at a time where there are vanishingly small immune benefits, if any.
The failure of the CDC to acknowledge basic facts like natural immunity for so long is a major part of the story of why people don't trust the government on these issues to begin with. You should blame health authorities' failure to show any degree of nuance on these issues (especially when other national health authorities have shown themselves capable of this) as a meaningful contributor to anti-vax skepticism; don't blame the people telling the truth.
I'm not a vaccine denier, I'm a vaccine skeptic, escpecially as it pertains to the Covid mRNA gene-therapies. They were untested, they weren't true vaccines. The CDC didn't call them vaccines at first, they said, "You can still catch and spread Covid, you still have to wear a mask." True Vaccines keep you from getting the disease once exposed to it.
There are still things that people can't explain, like how healthy athletes are having heart attacks after getting the therapies They can't explain why the lymph nodes are filling up with clots, and they can't explain why children are getting myocarditis.
Then, they dismissed natural immunity, which has been a hallmark for 300 years. When they started threatening to fire people for practicing body autonomy, I got even more skeptical when they started threatening to jail people for just going outside, I figured they were pushing trash.
“Heavy-handed public health bureaucrats are in a distant third place. Though they deserve to be condemned in the strongest terms possible for school closures, mask mandates, and other NPIs, to the extent that they made major mistakes when it came to vaccines it was the result of not putting more faith in them to allow us to get back to normal life sooner.”
This calls for more scrutiny into the motive for why they supported covid vaccination. Given that pro vax blue states and the public health officials who supported them were among the last to lift mask mandates and school closures, it should be understood that vaccine efficacy had little to do with their position. It was one tool in the toolkit of increasing their control over people’s behavior.
Being honest, do you really believe that if the vaccine had significantly less efficacy than the data showed, that these people wouldn’t have supported mandates anyway?
Not that we’re great at either, but people are generally much better at reading motive than they are at reading data. Public health officials had already exposed themselves as being primarily driven by increasing their say over everyday behavior and advocating for left wing social causes than they were with public health. People with these priorities aren’t necessarily wrong about 100% of the individual things they support, but if you’re a right leaning person who doesn’t understand medical studies or clinical trials, you know it’s generally not in your best interest to trust people like this.
The main problem with conservatives is they think that whoever says the opposite of the media/public health bureaucracy is therefore trustworthy, when obviously they’re not.
But you shouldn’t give public health officials the benefit of the doubt that they just didn’t have enough faith in the vaccines. They didn’t really care about how well the vaccines worked at all.
An example of a country that has achieved 100% good from the Richard Hananiah perspective is Denmark. They had a successful vaccine rollout with high take-up rates, they make cost-benefit decisions about who to target, and even recommend that under 18s do not get vaccinated without prejudicing their vaccination recommendations to other groups. They had no mandates and thus no socially destructive marginalisation of the unvaccinated. Once they had achieved their vaccination targets they lifted all restrictions on socialisation, which were already relatively limited and sane.
Now what is Denmark's magic formula that allows it to do things that Richard Hananiah considers impossible? Amazingly, it's being a racially and culturally homogenous country that has a Social Democratic state with high state capacity. What does Richard Hananiah advocate? Naturally, doing everything possible to be the opposite of Denmark.
It’s weird you correctly state RCT’s are the gold standard yet do not mention Pfizer’s own clinical trial RCT showed no difference in mortality for the vaccinated vs the placebo control….
You lost the moment you has to used the term "full vaccination".
Your data is trash.
The term "fully vaccinated" means there is about an eight week window where you could get covid, die from it, after getting the shot, and still be counted in the unvaccinated group.
Bayesian data crime.
There is no such thing as fully or partially vaccinated. These time lines were created to hide negative side effects and rig safety and efficacy figures.
What soured me on anti-vaxxerism (not that I was ever partial to it - I was one of the early testers of Sputnik) is that a lot of its most active proponents are... psychotic demented nutjobs.
Over the entirety of my blogging career I received more threats over COVID vaccines than everything else (Ukraine war included) to date. The topic really makes Nazis mad.
Also while I didn't put the dots together then, the Russian state's response to COVID (achieving the industrialized world's second highest mortality after Bulgaria, despite having developed an actually quite effective vaccine) was telling as to its real level of state capacity and Putin's leadership qualities.
You can’t separate the antivax sentiments from the lockdowns. All of the lies around that, the riots, etc. is what destroyed the credibility of the mainstream media and set the stage for the antivax movement
I think anti-vaxers might be one of the most dangerous groups in the world. If there’s another novel pandemic, the world is going to rely on the USA’s top-notch research establishment to produce another vaccine. Any group that wants to unjustly delay or halt development would be contributing to the deaths of millions across the world. Perhaps a future pandemic may be deadly enough to make anti-vax beyond the pale, but that’s cold comfort to people who died due to unnecessary delays.
You are careful to separate the schools of thought on the "anti-vax" side. I appreciate that.
Nevertheless there are liars and idiots on both sides. I don't even need to click the links to know that there are rebuttals to all your studies and statistics that you cite. Which is correct? I don't know.
Maybe that's how it's always been for a lot of topics, and the pandemic has just recently brought it to light. In the absence of certainty, though, I'm going to refrain from annual booster shots for a disease which was little more than an unpleasant cold when I got it (post-JNJ-vax).
You betray your certainty on the issue (seemingly an intentional and discrediting addition) by revealing that you're not "up to date" on boosters. Not just not-up-to-date, but you know less about your own vax status than about the headlines surrounding the topic.
| Getting any vaccine was clearly a good idea for almost any adult
Except working age ones.
The fact is older Americans who are generally more conservative did not buy into anti-vaxx conspiracy theories. According to data collected by the states, 95.0% of Americans above the age of 65 took atleast 2 doses of vaccine.
My parents and my in laws took the vaccine as they are older. My wife and I took the vaccine as well as we are in our late 40s. However, our oldest son who was is in high school did not take the vaccine as he is young and healthy and we were concerned about myocarditis risk outweighing benefits of covid vaccine.
The data on vaccination shows Americans understand the science better. Older Americans overwhelmingly took the vaccine as they were in the high risk category. Even when it comes to new bi-valent booster, only 18% of adults have taken it given covid is now not a risky disease anymore but 50% of seniors have taken it. Normal people understand the risks and benefits better. If you are obese, unhealthy or old, the vaccine saved lives.
An impressive compilation of Liberaltarian greatest hits. Let's review:
1) Tens of millions of people being denied basic human rights, like the right to seek employment or go to a restaurant, because they refuse to take a medical product is actually a minor infringement on liberty. The important infringements on liberty are those that make it harder for large corporations to make money.
2) If a large corporation is engaging in unethical business practices, it shouldn't be stopped because it's more important just to be pro market, and the market means that large corporations can do whatever they want.
3) If a government action causes harm, those to blame are those who opposed the government action, because if they hadn't have opposed it, it wouldn't have caused so much harm.
Finally, it is acknowledged around the world that MRNA vaccines are trash. Countries are trying and failing to literally give away for free hundreds of millions of doses and they can't. They are paying Pfizer to stop sending them any more of this crappy product. Only provincial Americans still think this is a good product.
Just about every chart has massive problems:
The charts comparing Trump to Biden area deaths inverts well before the vaccine hitting the market. The more likely explanation is that Biden won urban areas, which were hit by Covid earlier, and Trump areas are generally less populated, older and less healthy, meaning that Covid hit them later and did more damage.
The "we undercounted Covid deaths" assumes that all excess deaths were due to Covid. But, it was well documented how millions of people did not get cancer screens, normal physicals, etc, and also were less likely to go to the doctor or hospital if something felt a little off.
The unvaccinated vs vaccinated death rates is based off of a 2600 person data set, selected in who knows how, where there is no information on how vaccination status was determined.
Edit: I forgot to mention the chart of all the vaccine trials. Did you even look at the error bars, which were over 100% in many of the studies?
Almost completely disagree with you on all points. Mostly because I myself have a bona fide vaccine injury and I have witnessed many medical problems in people I personally know and very little medical improvement from anyone that was Covid vaccinated. I guess you haven’t looked at the life and disability claims from 2021-23. Many people agree with me, even ones that would rather not see this.
If you're trying to find the origin of right wing anti-vax crazies, there are multiple stories you could tell. You might blame rational opposition to government overreach on lockdowns and masks spilling over into irrational opposition to Warp Speed. You could direct the majority of your ire towards long standing anti-vax activists who spent decades spreading lies about measles vaccines causing autism, like RFK. But in this article you've chosen to go after people trying to explicate nuanced truths regarding e.g. natural immunity vs vaccine immunity, or cost/benefit for young men to take 3rd or 4th booster doses.
One of the signs that America has a dysfunctional health bureaucracy even relative to other countries is failure to tell the truth on nuanced issues like this. Other countries had no problem accounting for natural immunity in their vaccine requirements (e.g. France). Denmark already has long since retired their vaccination program for anyone under 50 without special health conditions. Meanwhile the CDC was mostly in denial that natural immunity was as effective as vaccination, and continues to recommend repeated Covid vaccination to young boys at a time where there are vanishingly small immune benefits, if any.
The failure of the CDC to acknowledge basic facts like natural immunity for so long is a major part of the story of why people don't trust the government on these issues to begin with. You should blame health authorities' failure to show any degree of nuance on these issues (especially when other national health authorities have shown themselves capable of this) as a meaningful contributor to anti-vax skepticism; don't blame the people telling the truth.
I'm not a vaccine denier, I'm a vaccine skeptic, escpecially as it pertains to the Covid mRNA gene-therapies. They were untested, they weren't true vaccines. The CDC didn't call them vaccines at first, they said, "You can still catch and spread Covid, you still have to wear a mask." True Vaccines keep you from getting the disease once exposed to it.
There are still things that people can't explain, like how healthy athletes are having heart attacks after getting the therapies They can't explain why the lymph nodes are filling up with clots, and they can't explain why children are getting myocarditis.
Then, they dismissed natural immunity, which has been a hallmark for 300 years. When they started threatening to fire people for practicing body autonomy, I got even more skeptical when they started threatening to jail people for just going outside, I figured they were pushing trash.
“Heavy-handed public health bureaucrats are in a distant third place. Though they deserve to be condemned in the strongest terms possible for school closures, mask mandates, and other NPIs, to the extent that they made major mistakes when it came to vaccines it was the result of not putting more faith in them to allow us to get back to normal life sooner.”
This calls for more scrutiny into the motive for why they supported covid vaccination. Given that pro vax blue states and the public health officials who supported them were among the last to lift mask mandates and school closures, it should be understood that vaccine efficacy had little to do with their position. It was one tool in the toolkit of increasing their control over people’s behavior.
Being honest, do you really believe that if the vaccine had significantly less efficacy than the data showed, that these people wouldn’t have supported mandates anyway?
Not that we’re great at either, but people are generally much better at reading motive than they are at reading data. Public health officials had already exposed themselves as being primarily driven by increasing their say over everyday behavior and advocating for left wing social causes than they were with public health. People with these priorities aren’t necessarily wrong about 100% of the individual things they support, but if you’re a right leaning person who doesn’t understand medical studies or clinical trials, you know it’s generally not in your best interest to trust people like this.
The main problem with conservatives is they think that whoever says the opposite of the media/public health bureaucracy is therefore trustworthy, when obviously they’re not.
But you shouldn’t give public health officials the benefit of the doubt that they just didn’t have enough faith in the vaccines. They didn’t really care about how well the vaccines worked at all.
An example of a country that has achieved 100% good from the Richard Hananiah perspective is Denmark. They had a successful vaccine rollout with high take-up rates, they make cost-benefit decisions about who to target, and even recommend that under 18s do not get vaccinated without prejudicing their vaccination recommendations to other groups. They had no mandates and thus no socially destructive marginalisation of the unvaccinated. Once they had achieved their vaccination targets they lifted all restrictions on socialisation, which were already relatively limited and sane.
Now what is Denmark's magic formula that allows it to do things that Richard Hananiah considers impossible? Amazingly, it's being a racially and culturally homogenous country that has a Social Democratic state with high state capacity. What does Richard Hananiah advocate? Naturally, doing everything possible to be the opposite of Denmark.
The Covid-19 MRNA vaccines haven’t failed, they have never been really tried, because people gave up after the fifth booster.
It’s weird you correctly state RCT’s are the gold standard yet do not mention Pfizer’s own clinical trial RCT showed no difference in mortality for the vaccinated vs the placebo control….