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.
Yes! I thought about writing the same thing. The anti-vax movement really appeals to some unhinged people, which has made me want to just keep pushing the issue.
That's not how I evaluate things. I looked more at their data than those of other conspiracy theorists and loons and became more certain they were wrong. The combination of being so wrong and so unhinged made me understand all the damage that they cause.
Gay sex is only dangerous for transmitting VDs via unprotected MM anal. Literally everything else is no more risky for transmitting VD than kissing. It's just nobody brings this up, because:
* The public health bureaucrats are psychotically risk averse, and will always advocate in favor against risk no matter how small the danger and how big the sacrifice.
* Nobody wants to be the one to tell a bunch of school kids in health class that they can experiment with oral sex as much as they like without risk of VD or pregnancy, for reasons almost too numerous to list, even though it's right. So they don't, and then they grow up to be idiots who still think bullshit like getting AIDS from unprotected oral sex was true just because they heard it in health class.
* There's a bunch of religious weirdoes in this country to this day, massively declining though they are, who didn't get any sex ed growing up, and they're sjust as dumb as the public-school dumbfucks.
I'm admittedly disturbed by the wokefied modern sex-ed trends (though it certainly has it's predecessors), and maybe mandatory sex ed is indeed a lost cause. But we need to at least be accurate with sex ed, and you're no better than retards in the '80s who thought that you could get it from a toilet seat if you blame it on all gay sex.
> Over the entirety of my blogging career I received more threats over COVID vaccines than everything else
As opposed to the people who didn't want to take them, who received no threats at all?
No, the psychotic nutjob Nazis here were the people who came within a hairs breadth of marching all the unvaccinated off to camps. They're the ones who whipped themselves into a frenzy and then started mass firings, locking people in their homes and seizure of people's bank accounts to try and force people to take the shots. I mean those were literally how the Nazis started, wasn't it?
And you get upset because you got some angry blog comments? Do you realize the vast gulf of experiences here? Have a song played from the world's tiniest violin.
I was indeed locked in my apartment for long periods, allowed only into supermarkets to buy food, when others were free to do what they wanted despite that the vaccinated were repeatedly coming down with COVID and spreading it. So yeah it was a kinda decentralized 'prison', as punishment for not taking it. And I was self employed so didn't even have to worry about work mandates. All for NOTHING because I was already immune to COVID. So yeah, thanks for asking.
What do you mean "immune to covid"? Natural immunity is a myth - it's a bioweapon FFS. Everyone in Africa is dead but nobody knows because they can't count. T-cells are just something DJT made up. Vaccines on top of infection create "hybrid immunity".
He said that open Neo-Nazi trolls specifically troll anyone who posts anything pro-vaccine more than they troll him over anything else. He's not using the term as an insult. It's literally just a description of what's happening, and anyone who spends any amount of time where Neo-Nazis aren't banned knows that this issue is by far their most triggering issue.
Their funeral, but the embrace of this issue by the mainstream right will lead to even fewer normal people to ever consider doing the right thing. Fringe minorities of idiots and psychopaths shouldn't have this much influence to punish innovations that are ~99% upside for ~99% of people. They should be ignored, and knocked in the teeth with hard objects if necessary.
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.
Yeah, this whole article is nonsense unfortunately. It's what happens to people when they fail to generalize quickly enough. Richard recognizes that the public health community / epidemiologists etc aren't reliable and make false claims, but thinks he's smart enough to recognize ALL the false claims coming from public health and then separate the truth from the lies. Sure, some data is bad but this data over here is OK. Sadly he's not able to reliably do this (few are).
Why do public health play so many games with data and science: because it works, often even on people who recognize the risk that they'll get played!
For those low IQ people with toxic masculinity etc, the classification issue you mention is important because when corrected for, you find that the vaccinated cohort got COVID more frequently than the unvaccinated cohort did. In other words the vaccines made people more susceptible not less. Very few countries were willing to publish the actual case numbers by vaccine status, exactly because this is what it showed for the few countries that did. For example by the time the UK stopped publishing these numbers vaccinated people were getting COVID at 3x-4x the rate of unvaccinated people.
This possibility sounds absurd and impossible at first, but what happened is now understood (at least by those with toxic masculinity, etc). It went like this:
1. When the virus mutates and new successful variants appear, they very rapidly and totally replace old variants. Exactly why this happens is unclear, but the fact that it does is accepted by everyone because sequencing results are so crystal clear.
2. The virus mutates into a new variant. The vaccines are slow to reach the market so they start training people's immune systems to target the by now long since obsolete and disappeared "wild type" virus, the one that predated any talk of variants.
3. Unfortunately, antibodies that target the old spike protein don't dock reliably/correctly to the new mutated spike (that's why it mutated in the first place). Doubly unfortunate: the immune system's initial response doesn't seem able to immediately notice that the spikes are different. It recognizes a SARS-CoV-2 spike and starts churning out antibodies as trained to do, but the antibodies are wrong and so the virus is able to continue replicating. This misfire goes by several names like immune fixation and the Hoskins effect.
4. Because the antibodies aren't fully effective the virus replicates out of control. The person becomes sick and infectious. The body does eventually respond, but the memory cells don't seem to always "catch up". So people can end up catching COVID again and again and again (a frequent complaint by people who are heavily vaccinated).
Now how do they hide that this is happening? After all, surely most of us know people who have experienced this by now. There's a three step trick:
1. Classify people as "unvaccinated" when in fact they've been given the shot weeks or months ago. If you work it through on a spreadsheet you'll see that this creates a short term boost in apparent effectiveness. Water looks 95% effective if you use the delay periods that were used by public health. This leads to an initially high looking effectiveness which then rapidly declines. This decline is actually caused by the math, but you can blame new variants for it instead and tell people they need even more shots.
2. Use something called test negative case control study design to change negative effectiveness into positive effectiveness. It's a method that's supposed to remove bias from the data cheaper than doing full blown studies with MLR but rests on the assumption that people can't choose when they get tested. Obviously not true for COVID. If people can volunteer to get tested then it distorts the results in favor of vaccines.
3. Redefine effectiveness for approval purposes as "creates the intended antibodies" and not "reduces disease". This is how you get stories like boosters being given to 8 mice, all of them get COVID, booster is considered highly effective anyway and approved to be given to hundreds of millions of people.
Then there's all the other more obvious tricks like refusing to classify side effects as side effects. But that's why they engage in this sort of classification delay trick. It's a known problem in study design that they somehow forgot about for COVID.
Oh it's worth elaborating on the math problem, perhaps.
It creates something called immortal time bias (the name predates COVID and is a medical science term, so this discussion is somewhat general). Immortal time is a time period during which people who take a drug/intervention literally cannot die, because if they did they'd have been classified into the not-taken bucket. It can affect any RCT where there is a delay before an intervention is considered to be effective, participants aren't properly bucketed and the outcome being measured is a terminal outcome (it can't happen twice to the same person).
Consider four people at the start of a 16 week trial. Two don't take anything, the other two think they're being injected with something meant to avoid infection but in fact they receive water. There is an 8 week delay before those who were injected are classified as having been so. Now imagine that half the study group gets infected within the first 8 weeks, one from the untreated bucket and one from the treated bucket. Then in the second time span nothing happens. In the case of a virus this is easy because we're talking about infections that come in waves and infection is a "terminal event" due to natural immunity (at least until it mutates enough but this is beyond the time horizon of COVID RCTs).
The correct conclusion is that the drug is ineffective: no difference in outcomes. And the injection was water so this is what we'd expect. But in a study with immortal time bias, you will conclude the opposite, because you will record 2 un-injected infections and zero injected infections. For that first 8 week period the water apparently made you completely invulnerable to infection, purely due to classification error.
If you run the numbers you find that this yields a very high effectiveness at first, but as the initial misclassification window becomes smaller relative to the total time period the impact wanes and the numbers return to what they should be. But then if you do something like take a booster the clock resets and you have another period of time in which you're considered to be not boosted.
Note the absurdity of this situation! Not only is the problem fairly obvious, but where did 8 weeks come from? The patients are being told that the side effects last only 24 hours or so, because the body will learn to identify the spikes and recover very quickly. In fact, there appears to be no biological basis for these time windows. If you try and dig in to find out where they come from you'll hit a brick wall of pharma confidentiality. Public health authorities just copied the technique from the RCTs. It's stuff like this, combined with a long track record of lying, that leads to justified distrust. The data used to prove that vaccines are great are produced by people who are practically required to claim as such.
This is a lot of words and some interesting ideas. There is a problem for a bystander reading your argument, which is that it is very hard to both get on-line with the nature of your objection, and also evaluate how the objection applies (in this case to particular case studies or RCT's or whatever). So can we make this very concrete? Can you please link to a published paper (maybe even two or three) that is widely cited as providing positive evidence that the vaccines worked, but which suffers from immortal time bias, which if properly corrected for, would reverse or muddy the conclusion?
Are you responding to the right message? None of that makes sense in the context of the discussion. The whole point is that immortal time bias causes one to incorrectly infer causality without evidence, hence why the example is concluding that water is highly effective.
This would be super convincing dismissal if partially vaccinated individuals didn't also have lower rates of death and hospitalization than the unvaccinated.
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.
Perhaps this time, the research will be allowed to conclude with solid RCTs, so we can detect safety signals long before the thing is rolled out to the entire population.
The death rate for Covid before mass vaccination in the US for working adults between thirty-five and forty-four was higher than the murder rate for all but the top three most murderous cities this year, and every subsequent working age decade was twice as higher a death rate as the one that came before:
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.
Rich opposed the lockdowns, but is for the extremely effective mRNA vaccine that has already changed the face of medicine, and might just give us a vaccine for AIDS as long as retards like you and Alex Berenson are ignored enough.
I am looking forward to this vaccine for AIDS, after which you still get AIDS, and which has no country-wide effect on prevalence of AIDS or death from AIDS, but about which you can show some chart that proves it is extremely effective.
In all seriousness, though, only provincial Americans who think constantly about not being perceived as declasse think this vaccine is 'extremely effective'. Germany is on course to destroy - not sell, not even give away, because no-one will take them - TWO HUNDRED MILLION vaccine doses. Because it's trash.
The conclusion is that it matters if you are liberaltarian because you are a rule utilitarian, deontologist, or act utilitarian. Richard mostly bounces between rule and act utilitarianism as it suits him and so concepts of rights have limited weight. For me it’s a mixed bag - good for analysis of civil rights law, but when it comes to government mandated medical intervention.
Even if you are strictly utilitarian, vaccine mandates caused significant economic disruption and, had they not been abandoned, would have done a lot worse. That's not to mention the utility people derive from not being chucked out of their job and being able to go to a restaurant.
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.
There is no reliable data on any of this, sadly. The medical establishment is highly regulated and dependent on grant funding. Once it was decided that any objection to vaccines at all, on any basis, made you one of the dreaded "anti vaxxers" then all logic and reason fell away. It was a classic mass hysteria.
Fundamentally public health is built on a contradiction: for the system to be trustworthy, it must be full of people who will flag dangerous vaccines as dangerous and be publicly rewarded and praised for doing so. But it is actually full of people who think any claim that a vaccine is dangerous is impossible, because that would be anti-vaxxer propaganda which is always wrong.
That's why when you look closely, it turns out that none of the systems designed to ensure vaccine safety actually work. They superficially resemble science from a distance, but zoom in and it's all just as fake as the epidemiological modelling was. These people were never going to be socially or psychologically capable of pushing back on COVID vaccines regardless of what happened.
There was no failure to stop a "dangerous" vaccine because we didn't have dangerous vaccines. The vaccinated had much lower mortality rates than the unvaccinated.
None of that data means what you think it means. The graph you're presenting isn't even what you're claiming it is (think about your statement and the title of the graph carefully!). See my other comments, which barely even scratch the surface of this topic.
Again and we cannot stress this enough - if you are going to try and build an argument for the COVID shots on the back of data given to you by the people who would do anything to make you take them, you're going to be easily fooled.
What about the title indicates I'm misrepresenting it?
The vaccine manufacturers aren't providing the mortality data. Why do you think the CDC "would do anything" to get people to take vaccines you regard as harmful?
You said, "The vaccinated had much lower mortality rates" but the graph is "COVID-19 death rates". You're making a claim about overall mortality but then trying to support it with a claim about COVID-19 specific mortality, as if they're the same thing, but:
1. The shots themselves killed some people.
2. The shots did not stop people getting COVID, so mortality is additive.
3. Many of the people labelled as unvaccinated were in fact vaccinated (see discussion elsewhere).
This sort of thing is a very common confusion, but think about how basic it is - the fact that the supposedly smart pro-vaxx set constantly mix these two things up is symptomatic of the general intellectual malaise surrounding the topic.
If you don't think very precisely about this topic it can lead to illogical conclusions. For example, you could conclude cyanide is the most effective vaccine possible, because nobody who takes it ever dies of COVID-19.
My doctor confirmed it, but I knew immediately that something was wrong. All blood tests were perfectly normal before, but never after. You don’t have to believe me, but that what I see and many others say the same thing about the same autoimmune disease.
One thing I noticed many years ago about the pro-vaccine side is their disgraceful conduct to people with vaccine injuries. Like, some poor mother takes her kid for a vaccine, he gets a fever four hours later then develops regressive autism with no prior symptoms at all and now he's a 24 year old who kicks down doors if he gets given three chicken nuggets instead of two. And 99% of pro-vaccers can't even bring themselves to say something vaguely sympathetic.
That's because correlation is not causation and there is simply no compelling evidence that vaccines, any vaccines, cause autism.
Actual vaccine injuries do exist of course but actual viruses and diseases do too. We can also talk about the disgraceful conduct of the antivax side towards people sick and dying of covid. Some even proclaimed it was all a hoax. The sick and dying weren't even real.
It exists, but it's a developmental disorder and even if you were to induce a severe vasculitis-induced fever with the vaccine you wouldn't get it. You don't just become autistic at 24 even if your brain cooks. The only way someone would posit that this happened is if they were writing for a tabloid and making a specific nod to the vaccine-autism link that didn't even work that way in its initial hypothesis.
Cochran consistently touted epidemiological models that predicted Covid would keep expanding until it tapped out at whatever herd immunity threshold was predicted by the estimated R number. But this failed to happen in any country even once because viruses don't work that way at all. Instead they go up and then down seasonally for reasons no-one understands. Cochran looked like a total fool during Covid and it's largely because he's a fatso who doesn't do any exercise and thought society should close itself down based on his reckless life choices.
Cochran won every bet he made. He didn't bet we would actually have as many deaths as would occur if we did nothing... because we didn't do nothing. Cochran looked like someone who knew what he was talking about (he had a creepy degree of accuracy regarding numbers of deaths), while all his opponents were provably wrong.
Not a single country anywhere in the world saw Covid spread until it had infected 60 of the population as Cochran repeatedly said that models showed it would do. And in fact no virus has ever behaved like this anywhere.
P.S. The Scott Alexander article is a true period piece. His definition of people who got Covid right is just a list of early Covid alarmists because he is writing at the peak of mass Covid alarmism. He probably feels quite silly about writing that. (I was an early Covid alarmist too, partly based on being a reader of Cochran and I remember this all very well).
I'm fine right now, so certainly no permanent injury. Excess deaths are the main reason I'm confident in the harms of COVID, and of course I'm not dead.
How do you know the deaths are "non-COVID"? The whole point of looking at excess deaths is that we don't have to bother with the usual tedious argument of "with COVID" vs "of COVID".
A vaccine isn't going to show "medical improvements", it's a guard against infection and disease caused by said infection. You can hardly look at individuals around you and "see" a vaccine working. You have to look at and compare large groups and infection and hospitalisation rates.
By that metric, "infection rates", the covid vaccines clearly did not work.
By "hospitalization rates", it's a tossup - some jurisdictions that bothered collect & publish vaccination status of covid hospitalized individuals found that by late 2021, those rates were about the same between the vaxxed and unvaxxed cohorts.
There were huge RCTs which showed a massive decrease in hospitalization rates. And counties/states with low Vax rates have had many more deaths and hospitalization since the vaccines came out.
> And counties/states with low Vax rates have had many more deaths and hospitalization since the vaccines came out.
The question there is whether it was unvaccinated or unvaccinated people who had deaths and hospitalization, and whether those few who had such severe covid are representative of the rest of the population in the first place.
This may not be persuasive because it confounds vaccine injuries and COVID-19 injuries. The only way to know is via experiment and experiments do not support a large role for vaccine injuries.
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.
They aren't gene therapy - they are true vaccines. You are trying to use misguided semantic games to justify an otherwise irrationally anti-vaxx position.
The inventor of mRNA Therapies himself said that the shots weren't vaccines; they were Gene Therapies. Vaccines give you immunity, the mRNA shots didn't give you immunity, they just lessened the effects of the disease. Had they been real vaccines, you wouldn't need to wear a mask.
A real vaccine contains an attenuated strand of the disease DNA that activates your T-cells and provides immunity to the real disease. IF they were real vaccines, you wouldn't need boosters every 6 months.
I think you mean the kook that is taking credit despite not being involved for a decade.
Vaccines (including the mRNA vaccine) trigger the immune system to react creating immunity. You've manufactured a definition of vaccine out of one method for creating a vaccine. Other vaccines also need boosters (Cf. TDAP, flu, shingles, MMR)
I am neither uneducated nor irrational, for I have seen healthy athletes fallen on the field after being jabbed. I hath seen the black goo that they found during autopsies, I hath seen the statistics of myocarditis in children.
Not all of the immunologists and virologists agree that the mRna therapies are highly effective or safe. And there is not even a consensus among family or ER doctors.
The truth is that vaccines in general are overhyped. There is broad consensus among medical historians that modern declines in mortality were achieved primarily by improvements in hygiene, nutrition and sanitation, and secondarily by antiseptic and antibiotics. Vaccines aren't useless, but the belief that we would have pre-modern mortality rates without them just isn't true. They are less important that chemotherapy, or simply the discovery that cigarettes cause cancer. The reason people in public health like vaccines so much is that they are cheap one-and-done interventions you can keep track of easily, but MRNA vaccines require bi-annual dosing to even work a little bit so they don't even meet that test.
They don't. Lefty fruitless were the bread and butter of the antivax movement in the US until DJT took up the cause, which he only promotes because he doesn't wanna admit that his elderly supermarket gave his son autism spectrum disorder; and which he clearly doesn't believe, because he didn't hesitate to take the needle the moment he could even though he already had natural immunity.
Anybody who falls for this is either a lunatic or a sucker. Though usually a bit of both.
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….
Actually there was a difference in mortality : it was higher in the vaccinated group. The trial was not large enough and way too short for the difference in deaths to achieve statistical significance though. In addition, they included very few old people in the trial, and excluded pregnant women, and then recommended vaccines to go in priority to these populations.
“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.
If you approached the entire issue with an open mind you might see things differently.
You put “anti-mandate” people dead last. That should be first. You could hardly deny at this point that the vaccinations do not prevent infection. That means that mandates are forced self-protection. That is gross overreach.
You have shot right past all of the data that show cardiac issues, the greatest risk of vaccines to the elderly, who were prioritized and quite frankly your data from politicized science can not be trusted.
And I’m vaccinated. I will never boost. I will never comply with a mandate.
I left Twitter and no longer have access, but there was a doctor there who claimed to have successfully treated over 20,000 cases of covid with zero deaths. Even NIH and the Mayo Clinic cite drugs that are effective treatments. Meanwhile the physician/politicians who approved licensure of vaccine manufacturers receive millions in royalties.
I’d suggest that you take a closer look, not at typically liberal-globalist news sources but at the data offered by studies critical of the vaccines.
No matter what your conclusions my first argument stands. The vaccines do not prevent infection. So, I don’t want what’s good for me?
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.
Yeah, the problem with thinking about the optimum vaccine strategy is that the vaccine is just kind of crummy. But in a hypothetical world where Hananiah was right about the vaccine stats, the logical conclusion would be that America should try and be more like Denmark.
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.
Yes! I thought about writing the same thing. The anti-vax movement really appeals to some unhinged people, which has made me want to just keep pushing the issue.
That seems like a pretty poor way to evaluate things. There are unhinged people on any side of any contentious political topic.
That's not how I evaluate things. I looked more at their data than those of other conspiracy theorists and loons and became more certain they were wrong. The combination of being so wrong and so unhinged made me understand all the damage that they cause.
Gay sex is only dangerous for transmitting VDs via unprotected MM anal. Literally everything else is no more risky for transmitting VD than kissing. It's just nobody brings this up, because:
* The public health bureaucrats are psychotically risk averse, and will always advocate in favor against risk no matter how small the danger and how big the sacrifice.
* Nobody wants to be the one to tell a bunch of school kids in health class that they can experiment with oral sex as much as they like without risk of VD or pregnancy, for reasons almost too numerous to list, even though it's right. So they don't, and then they grow up to be idiots who still think bullshit like getting AIDS from unprotected oral sex was true just because they heard it in health class.
* There's a bunch of religious weirdoes in this country to this day, massively declining though they are, who didn't get any sex ed growing up, and they're sjust as dumb as the public-school dumbfucks.
I'm admittedly disturbed by the wokefied modern sex-ed trends (though it certainly has it's predecessors), and maybe mandatory sex ed is indeed a lost cause. But we need to at least be accurate with sex ed, and you're no better than retards in the '80s who thought that you could get it from a toilet seat if you blame it on all gay sex.
Definitely not unique. Plenty of gay people didn't stop having gay sex despite the AIDS crisis. Obviously some of them paid the price for it.
> Over the entirety of my blogging career I received more threats over COVID vaccines than everything else
As opposed to the people who didn't want to take them, who received no threats at all?
No, the psychotic nutjob Nazis here were the people who came within a hairs breadth of marching all the unvaccinated off to camps. They're the ones who whipped themselves into a frenzy and then started mass firings, locking people in their homes and seizure of people's bank accounts to try and force people to take the shots. I mean those were literally how the Nazis started, wasn't it?
And you get upset because you got some angry blog comments? Do you realize the vast gulf of experiences here? Have a song played from the world's tiniest violin.
I was indeed locked in my apartment for long periods, allowed only into supermarkets to buy food, when others were free to do what they wanted despite that the vaccinated were repeatedly coming down with COVID and spreading it. So yeah it was a kinda decentralized 'prison', as punishment for not taking it. And I was self employed so didn't even have to worry about work mandates. All for NOTHING because I was already immune to COVID. So yeah, thanks for asking.
What do you mean "immune to covid"? Natural immunity is a myth - it's a bioweapon FFS. Everyone in Africa is dead but nobody knows because they can't count. T-cells are just something DJT made up. Vaccines on top of infection create "hybrid immunity".
(I'm being ironic).
Maybe you should take up your annoyance with the guy who originally brought up the Nazi comparison?
" So, you ended up in a concentration camp then? "
paraphrasing the hysterical left
its a step by step increase in intentions and potential violence
> So, you ended up in a concentration camp then?
That is not a logically necessary outcome of the above.
It's interesting how significant a percentage of the "intellectual" pro-vaxx argument consists of rhetoric like this.
Why should a person not make that comparison, which is not a claim of equality?
He said that open Neo-Nazi trolls specifically troll anyone who posts anything pro-vaccine more than they troll him over anything else. He's not using the term as an insult. It's literally just a description of what's happening, and anyone who spends any amount of time where Neo-Nazis aren't banned knows that this issue is by far their most triggering issue.
Their funeral, but the embrace of this issue by the mainstream right will lead to even fewer normal people to ever consider doing the right thing. Fringe minorities of idiots and psychopaths shouldn't have this much influence to punish innovations that are ~99% upside for ~99% of people. They should be ignored, and knocked in the teeth with hard objects if necessary.
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.
Yeah, this whole article is nonsense unfortunately. It's what happens to people when they fail to generalize quickly enough. Richard recognizes that the public health community / epidemiologists etc aren't reliable and make false claims, but thinks he's smart enough to recognize ALL the false claims coming from public health and then separate the truth from the lies. Sure, some data is bad but this data over here is OK. Sadly he's not able to reliably do this (few are).
Why do public health play so many games with data and science: because it works, often even on people who recognize the risk that they'll get played!
For those low IQ people with toxic masculinity etc, the classification issue you mention is important because when corrected for, you find that the vaccinated cohort got COVID more frequently than the unvaccinated cohort did. In other words the vaccines made people more susceptible not less. Very few countries were willing to publish the actual case numbers by vaccine status, exactly because this is what it showed for the few countries that did. For example by the time the UK stopped publishing these numbers vaccinated people were getting COVID at 3x-4x the rate of unvaccinated people.
This possibility sounds absurd and impossible at first, but what happened is now understood (at least by those with toxic masculinity, etc). It went like this:
1. When the virus mutates and new successful variants appear, they very rapidly and totally replace old variants. Exactly why this happens is unclear, but the fact that it does is accepted by everyone because sequencing results are so crystal clear.
2. The virus mutates into a new variant. The vaccines are slow to reach the market so they start training people's immune systems to target the by now long since obsolete and disappeared "wild type" virus, the one that predated any talk of variants.
3. Unfortunately, antibodies that target the old spike protein don't dock reliably/correctly to the new mutated spike (that's why it mutated in the first place). Doubly unfortunate: the immune system's initial response doesn't seem able to immediately notice that the spikes are different. It recognizes a SARS-CoV-2 spike and starts churning out antibodies as trained to do, but the antibodies are wrong and so the virus is able to continue replicating. This misfire goes by several names like immune fixation and the Hoskins effect.
4. Because the antibodies aren't fully effective the virus replicates out of control. The person becomes sick and infectious. The body does eventually respond, but the memory cells don't seem to always "catch up". So people can end up catching COVID again and again and again (a frequent complaint by people who are heavily vaccinated).
Now how do they hide that this is happening? After all, surely most of us know people who have experienced this by now. There's a three step trick:
1. Classify people as "unvaccinated" when in fact they've been given the shot weeks or months ago. If you work it through on a spreadsheet you'll see that this creates a short term boost in apparent effectiveness. Water looks 95% effective if you use the delay periods that were used by public health. This leads to an initially high looking effectiveness which then rapidly declines. This decline is actually caused by the math, but you can blame new variants for it instead and tell people they need even more shots.
2. Use something called test negative case control study design to change negative effectiveness into positive effectiveness. It's a method that's supposed to remove bias from the data cheaper than doing full blown studies with MLR but rests on the assumption that people can't choose when they get tested. Obviously not true for COVID. If people can volunteer to get tested then it distorts the results in favor of vaccines.
3. Redefine effectiveness for approval purposes as "creates the intended antibodies" and not "reduces disease". This is how you get stories like boosters being given to 8 mice, all of them get COVID, booster is considered highly effective anyway and approved to be given to hundreds of millions of people.
Then there's all the other more obvious tricks like refusing to classify side effects as side effects. But that's why they engage in this sort of classification delay trick. It's a known problem in study design that they somehow forgot about for COVID.
Oh it's worth elaborating on the math problem, perhaps.
It creates something called immortal time bias (the name predates COVID and is a medical science term, so this discussion is somewhat general). Immortal time is a time period during which people who take a drug/intervention literally cannot die, because if they did they'd have been classified into the not-taken bucket. It can affect any RCT where there is a delay before an intervention is considered to be effective, participants aren't properly bucketed and the outcome being measured is a terminal outcome (it can't happen twice to the same person).
Consider four people at the start of a 16 week trial. Two don't take anything, the other two think they're being injected with something meant to avoid infection but in fact they receive water. There is an 8 week delay before those who were injected are classified as having been so. Now imagine that half the study group gets infected within the first 8 weeks, one from the untreated bucket and one from the treated bucket. Then in the second time span nothing happens. In the case of a virus this is easy because we're talking about infections that come in waves and infection is a "terminal event" due to natural immunity (at least until it mutates enough but this is beyond the time horizon of COVID RCTs).
The correct conclusion is that the drug is ineffective: no difference in outcomes. And the injection was water so this is what we'd expect. But in a study with immortal time bias, you will conclude the opposite, because you will record 2 un-injected infections and zero injected infections. For that first 8 week period the water apparently made you completely invulnerable to infection, purely due to classification error.
If you run the numbers you find that this yields a very high effectiveness at first, but as the initial misclassification window becomes smaller relative to the total time period the impact wanes and the numbers return to what they should be. But then if you do something like take a booster the clock resets and you have another period of time in which you're considered to be not boosted.
Note the absurdity of this situation! Not only is the problem fairly obvious, but where did 8 weeks come from? The patients are being told that the side effects last only 24 hours or so, because the body will learn to identify the spikes and recover very quickly. In fact, there appears to be no biological basis for these time windows. If you try and dig in to find out where they come from you'll hit a brick wall of pharma confidentiality. Public health authorities just copied the technique from the RCTs. It's stuff like this, combined with a long track record of lying, that leads to justified distrust. The data used to prove that vaccines are great are produced by people who are practically required to claim as such.
This is a lot of words and some interesting ideas. There is a problem for a bystander reading your argument, which is that it is very hard to both get on-line with the nature of your objection, and also evaluate how the objection applies (in this case to particular case studies or RCT's or whatever). So can we make this very concrete? Can you please link to a published paper (maybe even two or three) that is widely cited as providing positive evidence that the vaccines worked, but which suffers from immortal time bias, which if properly corrected for, would reverse or muddy the conclusion?
The original RCTs by e.g. Pfizer have this problem. Look at the work of Norman Fenton for a much more in depth treatment of the issue.
Thank you for highlighting several specific flaws in your reasoning that confirm my original assertion that you are both uninformed and irrational.
Which are?
Attributing causality without evidence, not being aware of base rates, etc, etc. Fundamentally not understanding how evidence works.
Are you responding to the right message? None of that makes sense in the context of the discussion. The whole point is that immortal time bias causes one to incorrectly infer causality without evidence, hence why the example is concluding that water is highly effective.
This would be super convincing dismissal if partially vaccinated individuals didn't also have lower rates of death and hospitalization than the unvaccinated.
Have you won any public bets on COVID?
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.
Perhaps this time, the research will be allowed to conclude with solid RCTs, so we can detect safety signals long before the thing is rolled out to the entire population.
| Getting any vaccine was clearly a good idea for almost any adult
Except working age ones.
The death rate for Covid before mass vaccination in the US for working adults between thirty-five and forty-four was higher than the murder rate for all but the top three most murderous cities this year, and every subsequent working age decade was twice as higher a death rate as the one that came before:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1382357/covid-death-rates-us-by-age/
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-with-most-murders
Where the fuck do you live that people get to retire at thirty-four?
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.
Rich opposed the lockdowns, but is for the extremely effective mRNA vaccine that has already changed the face of medicine, and might just give us a vaccine for AIDS as long as retards like you and Alex Berenson are ignored enough.
I'm with Rich.
I am looking forward to this vaccine for AIDS, after which you still get AIDS, and which has no country-wide effect on prevalence of AIDS or death from AIDS, but about which you can show some chart that proves it is extremely effective.
In all seriousness, though, only provincial Americans who think constantly about not being perceived as declasse think this vaccine is 'extremely effective'. Germany is on course to destroy - not sell, not even give away, because no-one will take them - TWO HUNDRED MILLION vaccine doses. Because it's trash.
The conclusion is that it matters if you are liberaltarian because you are a rule utilitarian, deontologist, or act utilitarian. Richard mostly bounces between rule and act utilitarianism as it suits him and so concepts of rights have limited weight. For me it’s a mixed bag - good for analysis of civil rights law, but when it comes to government mandated medical intervention.
Even if you are strictly utilitarian, vaccine mandates caused significant economic disruption and, had they not been abandoned, would have done a lot worse. That's not to mention the utility people derive from not being chucked out of their job and being able to go to a restaurant.
Agree re: skepticism of vax mandates.
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.
You have anecdotes in the face of the most reliable kinds of evidence, and you don't truly know that a vaccine caused any injury in you.
There is no reliable data on any of this, sadly. The medical establishment is highly regulated and dependent on grant funding. Once it was decided that any objection to vaccines at all, on any basis, made you one of the dreaded "anti vaxxers" then all logic and reason fell away. It was a classic mass hysteria.
Fundamentally public health is built on a contradiction: for the system to be trustworthy, it must be full of people who will flag dangerous vaccines as dangerous and be publicly rewarded and praised for doing so. But it is actually full of people who think any claim that a vaccine is dangerous is impossible, because that would be anti-vaxxer propaganda which is always wrong.
That's why when you look closely, it turns out that none of the systems designed to ensure vaccine safety actually work. They superficially resemble science from a distance, but zoom in and it's all just as fake as the epidemiological modelling was. These people were never going to be socially or psychologically capable of pushing back on COVID vaccines regardless of what happened.
There was no failure to stop a "dangerous" vaccine because we didn't have dangerous vaccines. The vaccinated had much lower mortality rates than the unvaccinated.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status
None of that data means what you think it means. The graph you're presenting isn't even what you're claiming it is (think about your statement and the title of the graph carefully!). See my other comments, which barely even scratch the surface of this topic.
Again and we cannot stress this enough - if you are going to try and build an argument for the COVID shots on the back of data given to you by the people who would do anything to make you take them, you're going to be easily fooled.
What about the title indicates I'm misrepresenting it?
The vaccine manufacturers aren't providing the mortality data. Why do you think the CDC "would do anything" to get people to take vaccines you regard as harmful?
You said, "The vaccinated had much lower mortality rates" but the graph is "COVID-19 death rates". You're making a claim about overall mortality but then trying to support it with a claim about COVID-19 specific mortality, as if they're the same thing, but:
1. The shots themselves killed some people.
2. The shots did not stop people getting COVID, so mortality is additive.
3. Many of the people labelled as unvaccinated were in fact vaccinated (see discussion elsewhere).
This sort of thing is a very common confusion, but think about how basic it is - the fact that the supposedly smart pro-vaxx set constantly mix these two things up is symptomatic of the general intellectual malaise surrounding the topic.
If you don't think very precisely about this topic it can lead to illogical conclusions. For example, you could conclude cyanide is the most effective vaccine possible, because nobody who takes it ever dies of COVID-19.
It's not "the entire country", the source clearly says it's 23 jurisdictions containing 48% of the population. I thought you said you checked it out?
My doctor confirmed it, but I knew immediately that something was wrong. All blood tests were perfectly normal before, but never after. You don’t have to believe me, but that what I see and many others say the same thing about the same autoimmune disease.
One thing I noticed many years ago about the pro-vaccine side is their disgraceful conduct to people with vaccine injuries. Like, some poor mother takes her kid for a vaccine, he gets a fever four hours later then develops regressive autism with no prior symptoms at all and now he's a 24 year old who kicks down doors if he gets given three chicken nuggets instead of two. And 99% of pro-vaccers can't even bring themselves to say something vaguely sympathetic.
That's because correlation is not causation and there is simply no compelling evidence that vaccines, any vaccines, cause autism.
Actual vaccine injuries do exist of course but actual viruses and diseases do too. We can also talk about the disgraceful conduct of the antivax side towards people sick and dying of covid. Some even proclaimed it was all a hoax. The sick and dying weren't even real.
"there is simply no compelling evidence"
yes, that is true, if you don't permit evidence to compel you
The vaccine-autism link has been thoroughly investigated & debunked. Latching onto that is a reason to discount your other claims about vaccines.
"Develops regressive autism." Bro you need to stop reading so many trashcan American rightist publications.
Not sure what your objection is. But given prior experience, I wouldn't be surprised if you think regressive autism doesn't even exist.
It exists, but it's a developmental disorder and even if you were to induce a severe vasculitis-induced fever with the vaccine you wouldn't get it. You don't just become autistic at 24 even if your brain cooks. The only way someone would posit that this happened is if they were writing for a tabloid and making a specific nod to the vaccine-autism link that didn't even work that way in its initial hypothesis.
You people will believe anything the companies and experts that protect them tell you.
You're the most dangerous kinds of human beings. You are to be trusted by no one.
The moment your safety is threatened you'll be loading "the other" into the cattle cars.
I believe people like Greg Cochran with a track record of accurate predictions & winning bets. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-prediction/
Cochran consistently touted epidemiological models that predicted Covid would keep expanding until it tapped out at whatever herd immunity threshold was predicted by the estimated R number. But this failed to happen in any country even once because viruses don't work that way at all. Instead they go up and then down seasonally for reasons no-one understands. Cochran looked like a total fool during Covid and it's largely because he's a fatso who doesn't do any exercise and thought society should close itself down based on his reckless life choices.
Cochran won every bet he made. He didn't bet we would actually have as many deaths as would occur if we did nothing... because we didn't do nothing. Cochran looked like someone who knew what he was talking about (he had a creepy degree of accuracy regarding numbers of deaths), while all his opponents were provably wrong.
Not a single country anywhere in the world saw Covid spread until it had infected 60 of the population as Cochran repeatedly said that models showed it would do. And in fact no virus has ever behaved like this anywhere.
P.S. The Scott Alexander article is a true period piece. His definition of people who got Covid right is just a list of early Covid alarmists because he is writing at the peak of mass Covid alarmism. He probably feels quite silly about writing that. (I was an early Covid alarmist too, partly based on being a reader of Cochran and I remember this all very well).
you don't truly know that covid caused any injury in you
I'm fine right now, so certainly no permanent injury. Excess deaths are the main reason I'm confident in the harms of COVID, and of course I'm not dead.
| Excess deaths are the main reason I'm confident in the harms of COVID
Then you must be pretty concerned about non-covid excess deaths that have been on the rise in nations since ... um ... 2021.
How do you know the deaths are "non-COVID"? The whole point of looking at excess deaths is that we don't have to bother with the usual tedious argument of "with COVID" vs "of COVID".
Because the (reported) causes of death are recorded.
A vaccine isn't going to show "medical improvements", it's a guard against infection and disease caused by said infection. You can hardly look at individuals around you and "see" a vaccine working. You have to look at and compare large groups and infection and hospitalisation rates.
By that metric, "infection rates", the covid vaccines clearly did not work.
By "hospitalization rates", it's a tossup - some jurisdictions that bothered collect & publish vaccination status of covid hospitalized individuals found that by late 2021, those rates were about the same between the vaxxed and unvaxxed cohorts.
There were huge RCTs which showed a massive decrease in hospitalization rates. And counties/states with low Vax rates have had many more deaths and hospitalization since the vaccines came out.
> And counties/states with low Vax rates have had many more deaths and hospitalization since the vaccines came out.
The question there is whether it was unvaccinated or unvaccinated people who had deaths and hospitalization, and whether those few who had such severe covid are representative of the rest of the population in the first place.
This may not be persuasive because it confounds vaccine injuries and COVID-19 injuries. The only way to know is via experiment and experiments do not support a large role for vaccine injuries.
Experiments that were to assess vaccine injuries were aborted - placebo arms blown up - no control remaining.
I am familiar with the history but can you link it for safekeeping?
e.g.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/01/pfizer-and-biontech-speed-up-timeline-for-offering-covid-19-to-placebo-volunteers/
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/969143015/long-term-studies-of-covid-19-vaccines-hurt-by-placebo-recipients-getting-immuni
Richard only believes "the data" and you must "trust the data". Amen.
The data, properly analysed. What would you suggest instead? Believe random anecdotes? Believe "lived experience"? " Other ways of knowing"?
Data and proper analysis of said data is at the root of all scientific knowledge.
and "proper analysis" is best done by pfizer hiding results for 75 years, amirite
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.
They aren't gene therapy - they are true vaccines. You are trying to use misguided semantic games to justify an otherwise irrationally anti-vaxx position.
The inventor of mRNA Therapies himself said that the shots weren't vaccines; they were Gene Therapies. Vaccines give you immunity, the mRNA shots didn't give you immunity, they just lessened the effects of the disease. Had they been real vaccines, you wouldn't need to wear a mask.
A real vaccine contains an attenuated strand of the disease DNA that activates your T-cells and provides immunity to the real disease. IF they were real vaccines, you wouldn't need boosters every 6 months.
I think you mean the kook that is taking credit despite not being involved for a decade.
Vaccines (including the mRNA vaccine) trigger the immune system to react creating immunity. You've manufactured a definition of vaccine out of one method for creating a vaccine. Other vaccines also need boosters (Cf. TDAP, flu, shingles, MMR)
We are going to continue to disagree on this. I don't consider the mRNA therapies vaccines. I won't take them, don't trust them.
But hey, if you do, then do you.
Enjoy the boosters every six months.
By all means be irrational and uneducated about the subject.
All of the science support the mainstream view that the mRNA vaccines are highly effective and incredibly safe.
I am neither uneducated nor irrational, for I have seen healthy athletes fallen on the field after being jabbed. I hath seen the black goo that they found during autopsies, I hath seen the statistics of myocarditis in children.
Not all of the immunologists and virologists agree that the mRna therapies are highly effective or safe. And there is not even a consensus among family or ER doctors.
Are thou by chance of the party of the donkey?
If they were highly effective you wouldn't need to keep taking them, would you?
The Covid-19 MRNA vaccines haven’t failed, they have never been really tried, because people gave up after the fifth booster.
The truth is that vaccines in general are overhyped. There is broad consensus among medical historians that modern declines in mortality were achieved primarily by improvements in hygiene, nutrition and sanitation, and secondarily by antiseptic and antibiotics. Vaccines aren't useless, but the belief that we would have pre-modern mortality rates without them just isn't true. They are less important that chemotherapy, or simply the discovery that cigarettes cause cancer. The reason people in public health like vaccines so much is that they are cheap one-and-done interventions you can keep track of easily, but MRNA vaccines require bi-annual dosing to even work a little bit so they don't even meet that test.
They don't. Lefty fruitless were the bread and butter of the antivax movement in the US until DJT took up the cause, which he only promotes because he doesn't wanna admit that his elderly supermarket gave his son autism spectrum disorder; and which he clearly doesn't believe, because he didn't hesitate to take the needle the moment he could even though he already had natural immunity.
Anybody who falls for this is either a lunatic or a sucker. Though usually a bit of both.
no true full vaccination has ever been tried
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….
Actually there was a difference in mortality : it was higher in the vaccinated group. The trial was not large enough and way too short for the difference in deaths to achieve statistical significance though. In addition, they included very few old people in the trial, and excluded pregnant women, and then recommended vaccines to go in priority to these populations.
Link to this supposed study?
https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/no-all-cause-mortality-benefit-in-pfizers-clinical-trial-for-mrna-vaccine-why-6d89b1de0c8d Link to primary documents in this piece
“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.
While I agree with your general point:
>data on excess deaths shows
No it doesn't, data on excess deaths is mostly garbage and cannot be used to show much about anything.
>Republican areas started dying at higher rates after vaccines became available.
Or old people started dying at higher rates after vaccines became available.
>mandatory vaccination in certain cases is, in any economics textbook, the canonical example of justified government coercion,
The "certain" is doing a lot of work here, and "canonical" seems like hyperbole.
If you approached the entire issue with an open mind you might see things differently.
You put “anti-mandate” people dead last. That should be first. You could hardly deny at this point that the vaccinations do not prevent infection. That means that mandates are forced self-protection. That is gross overreach.
You have shot right past all of the data that show cardiac issues, the greatest risk of vaccines to the elderly, who were prioritized and quite frankly your data from politicized science can not be trusted.
And I’m vaccinated. I will never boost. I will never comply with a mandate.
I left Twitter and no longer have access, but there was a doctor there who claimed to have successfully treated over 20,000 cases of covid with zero deaths. Even NIH and the Mayo Clinic cite drugs that are effective treatments. Meanwhile the physician/politicians who approved licensure of vaccine manufacturers receive millions in royalties.
I’d suggest that you take a closer look, not at typically liberal-globalist news sources but at the data offered by studies critical of the vaccines.
No matter what your conclusions my first argument stands. The vaccines do not prevent infection. So, I don’t want what’s good for me?
Why is that anyone else’s call??
Excellent comment!
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.
and despite all of that vaccination "success", denmark's covid case/death rates have been decidedly middling
Yeah, the problem with thinking about the optimum vaccine strategy is that the vaccine is just kind of crummy. But in a hypothetical world where Hananiah was right about the vaccine stats, the logical conclusion would be that America should try and be more like Denmark.
agreed
the mandate aspect is not just an auxiliary issue - it is the CORE issue
measures that are safe and effective need not be mandated
measures that are unsafe and/or ineffective must not be mandated
That's a lie.
https://github.com/dkobak/excess-mortality