The problem is that the perception of public trust is eroding significantly the more we learn and the more fervent the mandates become. We pulled the swine flu vaccine for way less back in 2010, I think it was 12 cases of GBS only! The fact that I know of people who have either had mycarditis AND clots tells me the rate is much higher then reported by VAERS.
The reason damn near everyone except for adamant anti-vax have the perception that VACCINE=SAFE/GOOD is that 93% of experimental candidates are rejected and it takes 10-15 years of trails and data to get full approval. It's the reason you are confident giving it to your own children the safety standards are so stringent. These comparisons to your chances of car accidents and being struck by lighting are totally bogus, you need to compare the data to past vaccines! And yet we think we got this mRNA/Adenovirus vector formula right on the first try times 3 different brands with 2 years of reduced trials?
That's all gone out the window for the sake of the pandemic emergency and that's fine as long as the choice is clear and consensual, let those who want it take the risk, but don't mandate it. The VAERS data is abysmal, worse then the past 50 years of all vaccine combined, and yet people are now in the mode of dismissing the VAERS system entirely because its self reported, with no alternative to fall back to! The FDA even had the option of setting up a separate system for covid vaccine adverse event reporting and rejected it. Fine, then VAERS it is! The only system we have ever had to judge this by.
At what point is it ethical to hand someone a long list of side effects that occur at x50+ higher rates then past vaccines and then say "but you must take this or you can't work".
I think in 10 years, we will see this technology as higher risk but much faster turn around times compared to traditional vaccines. Just be up front about it and let people choose.
Anecdote. Fear mongering. Misleading statistic. Misleading/demonstrably wrong information presented with an air of "obviously". Conspiracy... What is eroding trust in vaccines are narratives like this. You pretend like every single point you raise (accelerated development, VAERS) doesn't have a clear explanation that is readily available with a single search. You pretend as if these "issues" you identify are swept under the rug to push unsafe vaccines on people, when in fact they are openly and frequently discussed. It's a (sadly common) argumentative sleight of hand.
Back when the virus was less infectious and it was plausible to get to herd immunity with 60% of the adults vaccinated, I thought a good information campaign can get you there. In the US about a third of the population believes that Biden won through Voter fraud. Factual information, no matter how well presented or corroborated, only gets you so far if someone with a megaphone has a narrative to push.
Is it "factual" Biden didn't win through voter fraud? How exactly did you determine this? (to be clear I'm not suggesting he did, only questioning your methods of determining truth).
"Back when it was plausible to get to herd immunity with 60% of adults vaccinated".
That was never possible with these series of vaccines which don't prevent transmission, don't give full protection, and don't last very long. It's frankly stunning to me someone would make such a statement at this point in time.
> Is it "factual" Biden didn't win through voter fraud?
Yes.
> How exactly did you determine this?
By waiting for all the people who did assert voter fraud to present their hard evidence in court. There wasn't any.
It's like asking whether it's "factual" that Obama is a human man instead of a secret lizard person wearing an advanced nanotech disguise. I can't affirmatively prove the non-existence of something, but that doesn't mean it's less of a fact.
That's exactly what I'm saying. I can't prove a negative -- the burden of proof is on the other party.
By your reasoning, being unable to prove a negative means that, outside of maybe math, facts don't really exist. I can't prove that WW2 wasn't an elaborate hoax, I can't prove that Texas is a real state, I can't prove that babies aren't brought around by very stealthy storks.
The point is, you already accept WW2 as factual -- or you certainly wouldn't object to someone presenting it as such on an internet forum -- despite it possibly being a shared worldwide hallucination, so you're not even being internally consistent.
The probability Texas is a real state is very different then the probability fraud caused Trump to lose the 2020 election.
You again are appealing to ridicule.
Once again, just to be clear, I'm not saying Trump won the 2020 election. Trump's claims he won for sure and "everyone knows it" are just as nonfactual and people who claim Trump actually won is a "fact" are also making preference based statements of faith, just as you and original poster are doing. Unless they have top secret proof they are not sharing which as you alluded to earlier, appears unlikely.
What I'm taking about is the nature of "absolute fact" and "probability" and stating things as certain facts that are not certain facts. Also assessing the possibility or probability of events occurring.
Here are statements I'd have no problem with:
"No conclusive evidence has been presented that fraud tipped the scales in the 2020 election"
"It appears extremely unlikely Trump actually won the 2020 election because the evidence thus far presented in court has not held up to scrutiny"
Here is a statement I do have a problem with:
"1/3 of people are so dumb they don't even believe the "fact" that the 2020 election was legitimate so XXX because facts don't matter to unwashed idiots" (which was the gist of the original post I took exception with).
You are imposing arbitrary and extreme standards for the usage of the term fact. These standards neither reflect real world usage, nor do they reflect any sensible first principle definition.
You also consistently conflate trust and faith. I have to trust a number of entities to come to the conclusion that this is a fact. Just like I have to trust a number of social entities to come to the conclusion that the existence of atoms is a fact. The point is that there are excellent reasons to trust these entities. Faith is trust without reason. That is _not_ at play here.
It's entirely within the realm of probability that an election was fraudulent enough to alter the outcome. That has happened in world history more then once.
On the other hand it's not within the realm of reasonable possibility that Texas doesn't actually exist.
These two scenarios are not comparable.
It very simply is not a "fact" that Joe Biden won the election cleanly (nor the converse). It might be most probable but it is not "fact" and there are people who feel the evidence points to a different conclusion then you have arrived at. Perhaps they are wrong but the issue here is one of "fact" and determining "fact" in this case is a very large search space. At most (right now) we can say what evidence we see and what we believe is most probable, not beat our opponents over the head for how stupid they are for not seeing "facts". (this was my whole point).
faith
/fāTH/
noun
1.
complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
You are right, Texas is not a good example here. I will give you another one instead:
September 18, 2006 light from a massive supernova reached earth. The star exploded in galaxy NGC 1260 238,000,000 light years away. This was the most energy intensive supernova ever recorded, and it's observation made it onto the Time magazine Top 10 scientific discoveries of the year.
This explosion is considered a scientific fact. You can not prove that this was not faked. I consider the likelihood that it was faked considerably higher than the likelihood that Trump won the election. Why? You would need to coordinate fewer people to fake it, and the people whom you would need to coordinate would be roughly neutral towards the outcome you are manufacturing. In contrast to tip the election without _any_ evidence of this subterfuge emerging you need to coordinate a lot more people, and many of those are actively working _against_ the outcome you are manufacturing.
I mean, i get where you are coming from: "Texas I can go and look at, microbes I can get a microscope and check myself, the electio I obviously can't!". Your problem is just that you stop thinking at this point. There just is more to it.
Either way, it's abundantly clear that the reason that 30% of the US believe the election was tipped has nothing to do with these philosophical points you raise. The election was not any more or less secure than the last couple of dozen that people by and large accepted. The only thing that changed is that Trump, for personal gain, actively undermined the trust in institutions specifically engineered to make cheating hard and to certify results.
But I suspect you probably know that on some level already.
They reduce the likelihood of catching it, and reduce the likelihood of transmission when you get it.
A herd immunity situation still involves individuals catching and spreading a disease, but the R value is below 1, so it fizzles out quickly.
Have a node in the graph reduce both incoming and outgoing probability of transmission reducea the R value.
The argument you can make is that covid's R value is so high that it doesn't matter how many people get vaccinated or catch covid, it will continue spreading, but "full protection" is irrelevant
The "reduce likelihoods" would need real numbers to determine if the R value would be below 1 and thus fizzle.
Hand waving doesn't show this and I feel it's unlikely given the amount vaccinated infection observed.
We didn't know everything we do now, but near as I can tell herd immunity was never a realistic possibility. It was with for the foreseeable future as soon as it went multinational and became a management rather then elimination task.
> The fact that I know of people who have either had mycarditis AND clots tells me the rate is much higher then reported by VAERS
My daughter's bf's friend's mom died of a stroke two days after getting the vaccine. Two of my brother-in-laws where hospitalized for heart issues after the vaccine. Another friend of ours now has bad tinnitus after getting the vaccine. A guy at my dad's work stroked out within 48 hours of getting the vaccine. I have a small social circle and I can think of 5 cases off the top of my head of negative reactions to the vaccines.
This is not to say the vaccine is bad. This make me think we are not properly tracking and reporting all the side effects. I want more time and more data. A couple of years at the minimum I'd think.
A couple of data points from the UK. I know more people who have had vaccine issues than some of the 1 in 400,000 have problems stats would suggest. On the other hand the national death rates vs cases are about 1/10 what they were before the vaccines so they definitely improve your chances.
Time does not give you anything beneficial. Administering more doses with better tracking does. If we just waited for some years and started to use the vaccine, we would be still in similar situation.
>And yet we think we got this mRNA/Adenovirus vector formula right on the first try times 3 different brands with 2 years of reduced trials?
Actually mRNA vaccines/tech been in development and trials for a long time (decades). What was done in last year is to encode specific mRNA and trial it. Not the entire "envelope".
> Actually mRNA vaccines/tech been in development and trials for a long time (decades).
Obviously the parent was not referring to the entire development history of mRNA tech, any more than one would include the initial work on inventing the internal combustion engine when talking about how much safety testing had been carried out for a new model car.
The usual safety trials were not carried out for these vaccines, full stop.
They were not using 40,000 people trials in 2015 for mRNA based technologies. That was the point. Just because something was in its infancy in the lab doesn't mean you can say its been around almost 7 years already. The concern that there is no long term data is a valid one. Adenovirus vector formulations do have a longer history but have caused leukemia's in the past that manifest 4 years later for single gene mutation correction trials.
It really depends on disease prevalence, technological capability and urgency. For example during ebola epidemic RVSV-ZEBOV vaccine was administered to infected people prior any previous human testing. H1N1 vaccine was developed in number of months (3rd phase trial size was 2200 persons) but sufficient and timely mass production failed.
>Obviously the parent was not referring to the entire development history of mRNA tech, any more than one would include the initial work on inventing the internal combustion engine when talking about how much safety testing had been carried out for a new model car
Not obviously. Many people think that tech only appeared for first time "yesterday"
>The usual safety trials were not carried out for these vaccines, full stop.
Kinda yes and kinda no. They were trialing technology for a long time to know overall safety profile. In a moment that it's clear, it's not much different than early flu vaccine updates that don't go through "usual safety trial"
Here's my vaccine anecdata. My wife and I are at the age when everyone we know is starting to have kids. My wife and I got pregnant on the first try, and 3 of her other friends had similar easy success. All 4 unvaccinated. On the vaccinated side of her friends there are two miscarriages, one stillbirth, one who has been trying since June, one trying much longer than that, and one that we think has been trying for a while but hasn't announced it to the group.
If these were caveman times and those people were drinking from a different stream, we would tell them not to drink from it. 3/3 success stories vs. 3 traumatic failures and two or three infertility issues.
While we are sharing meaningless anecdotes, almost everyone I know (since I live in Seattle) has been vaccinated. No one has reported any issues, a couple have since successfully had a child. None have even gotten a breakthrough infection of covid. Among friends I know from back east, who haven't gotten vaccinated, one had just turned 30, only health issue was obesity. He died. One was 35, best shape of any of my friends, was in ICU for 7 days with double pneumonia. And one miscarriage.
But hey, the good thing is, we also have data. And the data, shows no correlation between vaccination and these problems you're referring to, and yet a VERY HIGH correlation (and some good reasons to say causation) between getting covid and having these issues.
Leading vaccine developer Nikolai Petrovsky (who's working on a traditional, protein-based vaccine) recently mentioned in an interview that if he had a pregnant wife he'd advise her to avoid both the virus and the vaccine (something only the privileged could attempt, so not a one-size-fits-all recommendation) [1]
(In a more technical interview aimed at a scientific audience, he outlines a number of issues he has with the current options. [2])
One of Petrovsky's key issues is that on pregnancy and children, the sensitivity is so high and risks so great that there is usually a much, much higher bar before vaccines are authorised for use: that's been the history of traditional, protein-based vaccines where it can take decades before they're authorised for use in pregnant women, babies, children.
Pfizer only began their pregnancy and safety trials in February this year - so only a little over 7 months ago. It is designed to observe pregnancy through to newborns reaching 6 months of age, and will complete in a year.
So we currently have no safety data in pregnancies from pre-conception via all-important and sensitive first trimester, through to full term + 6 months.
Keep in mind the WHO changed position on safety and aligned with the CDC on recommending the vaccine 3 weeks before Pfizer even started its safety trials.
None of this is to say that getting Covid isn't currently provably worse than getting a current vaccine.
It's just to say the safety data is incomplete, there are still unknowns which could change the calculation significantly considering the nature of the technology used, and we just won't fully understand the issues for some time to come.
(Also keep in mind that with mandates, the proposal is for all to receive the current options, but the alternative is not for all pregnant women to become infected. The risk calculation generally assumes wrongly here.)
I personally think avoiding getting infected ever, just is so impractical as to not lay out as an option. As evidence more and more is showing both infected and vaccinated people are likely to spread the infection (even if they don't get symptoms) as soon as 3 months after the acquired "immunity". Combined with how infectious delta is, this third choice of never getting infected just feels disingenuous.
Do we even know the real number? VAERS is highly underreported and how many vaccine cases are just getting labeled as "covid cases"... I love the southpark skit about this "covid related"... worth a watch.
This is complete nonsense. If anything VAERS would be over-reported, the people who are most against vaccination, blast it so often I see it in my facebook feed more often than advertisements. Anyone can add to VAERS, and I'm sure with all the antivaxx advertisement of it, they DO. Not to mention that doctors are required to, and report even unrelated deaths that happen right after vaccination. Meanwhile the reporting standards for covid, are the same as flu, nothing's changed there just a bunch of people grasping at straws, toward what goal I can't imagine.
You can hone your vaccines as long as you want when the disease prevalence is low. For example when you have archived a large enough immunity by unfortunate natural infection or by previous vaccines.
During pandemic, vaccines are quickly developed like happened with H1N1 in 2009 that was last modern pandemic before SARS-Cov-2. Before that was Hong-Kong flu pandemic and before that Asian. In all cases the vaccine development was very fast. For Hong-Kong flu it was 4 months. For Asian flu it was a little longer. Development a vaccine for Swine flu took also few months but rapid production failed and the vaccine was delayed.
> The problem is that the perception of public trust is eroding significantly ...
There are many problems. That's not one of them. Here is a better list of problems:
1. People don't understand what "research" means. Hint: watching a Youtube video with no peer-reviewed research is not "research";
2. People fundamentally don't understand and assess risk correctly. This long predates the anti-vaxxer hyseria. It's why, for example, people are afraid to fly but not (usually) afraid to drive when the chances of dying while driving are significantly higher;
3. We've had 700,000 deaths of Covid-19 in the US. According to the CDC, 1% of those are for people aged under 30. It's also likely the Covid deaths are underreported (eg New York not attributing nursing home deaths to Covid last year) but let's take the conservative view. That's 7,000 Americans under 30 who have died from Covid. Roughly 120M/330M people are under 30 so that puts the death rate at roughly 6 per 100,000 people. Even the most pessimistic view of negative side effects of vaccines rooted in reality is significantly less than that. Thus the correct risk response is to take the vaccine;
4. I've long held the view that climate change won't be fixed by collective altruism. The only option (IMHO) is for the solution to be economic. Covid has done nothing but confirm this for me. Climate change involves massive collective cost and inconvenience. Taking a vaccine involves the mildest inconvenience and, at best, one in a million odds of serious negative results yet people won't even do that.
5. The deep-rooted idea that unfettered selfishness if a virtue combined with anti-intellectualism is a pervasive and dangerous problem.
6. This idea that the whole world is in on this conspiracy to hide the truth is farcical narcissism. Occam's Razor tells you this is wrong. People just aren't competent enough to keep secrets. It's what gives me confidence there are no aliens in Area 51 and that pretty much every conspiracy theory is bullshit.
7. People conflate long-term drug side effects with vaccine side effects. Drugs have complicated interactions with pretty much every part of body chemistry and these can take years to surface. Immune responses are entirely different and very quick with a narrower risk profile. It's why we already know of issues like clotting with AZ and (allegedly) slightly elevated mycarditis risk with young people and Moderna, mere months into their usage;
8. We've now administered billions of doses of Covid vaccines. If there were serious problems they'd be evidence by now;
9. People don't understand what "emergency authorization" (from the CDC) actually means. It's essentially an administrative not medical issue. The Covid vaccines still went through Phase 3 clinical trials;
10. All the while claiming the true dangers are hidden, the VAERS data is confused and misstated. For one, it's reporting of what could be potential side effects to those who have had the vaccine. That data is mined for patterns to identify issues. Those issues have largely not been identified as you and others have claimed.
It's sad to me how many people who supposedly have a science education are able to fall for this crap. I mean just look at the vaccination rates of nurses (/sigh).
It's hard not to look at all this and think that humanity is screwed.
It may seem macabre (and it is) it's that the unvaccinated now are ~99% of Covid deaths and one can view this as evolution in action.
> We've now administered billions of doses of Covid vaccines. If there were serious problems they'd be evidence by now
An economist steps over a $20 bill asserting it must be fake; someone else would have picked it up if it were real.
My family is sending me videos and articles about people who are claiming side effects and being ignored, and I'm wondering if there are some $20s laying on the ground.
Have they contacted local and/or state and/or federal health and regulatory agencies?
Have their claims been evaluated by professionals or officials? Does "ignored" actually mean investigated, and found to not be credible?
On top of this, articles and videos from people claiming side effects fall squarely into the anecdata category. Evidence from billions of administered vaccine doses falls squarely into the empirical category.
Believing that these claims must be real because someone put them on the interwebz is making the same logical error as your economist.
> We've now administered billions of doses of Covid vaccines. If there were serious problems they'd be evidence by now.
Listen, this sort of argumentation creates mistrust. If this is how seemingly rational people argue (and dear god i hope it's not) then no wonder there is a lot of mistrust in society around these matters. Or maybe you were sarcastic, and in that case, you got me!
Why? People use this kind of logic all the time to say that commonplace activities are unlikely to be that risky — in fact we have the opposite problem with so many people being used to things like influenza being softened by widespread vaccination that they collectively under-estimate the risks of the untreated form.
Just because lots of people do it doesn't mean it's a rational thing to do. As i see it, the only thing that matters in science is to be factual. If we stop being impeccable with our words, we are no better than the conspiracy nuts.
To say that the evidence would have been here now is simply not true because we can't possibly know WHEN symptoms will present.
What would be more appropriate would be to say that in the time frame from when people started getting vaccinated until now it doesn't seem like the vaccines are causing to many serious side effects. That is fair to say. What about in 5 years? We DON'T know. This is a fact.
> To say that the evidence would have been here now is simply not true because we can't possibly know WHEN symptoms will present.
Actually, we can. Vaccination isn’t long-term exposure but a brief immune trigger — this is very different from medication being taken over a long term because the vaccine is only in your body for such a short period of time. In the multi-century history of vaccination, side effects are almost always immediate and the longest delays are measured in weeks, not years. There’s no mechanism for a longer reaction time because your immune system doesn’t work that way.
I don't wanna be a jerk, but honestly that proves my point. The correct wording would be; "there's a high probability that we can". But saying "we can" is clear cut. You provide strong arguments, but unless you have a time machine, you can't argue in definitives.
That's just providing that your point is about pedantry. It is commonly accepted in life that there are many events which are not completely impossible but are so low probability that they are not worth considering. Just as we do not commonly go around accounting for the possibility of a meteor strike or alien invasion, we also do not commonly describe the risks of common medical procedures involving the discovery of a previously-unsuspected immune mechanism with a time delay measured in years.
Absolutely. I am nitpicking. And i am in a mood to debate to be honest so i hope you're not offended. I too use commonly accepted assumptions in daily life. However, in debates i try to steer clear of them (reasons outlined above). But to each his own! Have a good night fellow human :)
It's unlikely to be that frequent — I'd expect more like the annual combined flu + COVID vaccinations being tested — but again, there's nothing in the history of vaccination suggesting that would be a high risk. Vaccines trigger your immune system and it doesn't have delayed action mechanisms which would trigger a response months later.
You have my sympathies if indeed you did have a severe adverse reaction from a Covid vaccine. I say "if" because honestly, anyone can say anything on the Internet. That doesn't make it true.
But let's assume it is: by itself, it's basically irrelevant. What you've presented, if 100% true, is an anecdote. These situations need to be looked at in aggregate. To start with:
- How common is it? Is it 1 in 10,000 or 1 in a billion? What level is acceptable?
- Is the likelihood of adverse effects related to Covid risk factors? Example: this submission is about the prospect of an elevated risk of myocarditis for young recipients of the Moderna vaccine. Well, that's also an issue for people who get Covid. So the vaccine's adverse reaction may go hand in hand with an elevated risk of severe Covid outcomes due to the same underlying risk factors;
- How does the likelihood of severe vaccine reactions compare to the decreased chance of severe Covid outcomes (eg being on a ventilator, long Covid, death)?
- Factored into the above, what about the improvement in outcomes for the population as a whole from having a sufficiently large number of vaccinated people (ie herd immunity)? This also includes people who genuinely cannot get the vaccine.
- Not getting the vaccine clearly increases severe outcomes from getting Covid. Based on the data, this is undeniable (eg 98-99% of Covid deaths are now among the unvaccinated). Being unvaccinated means you increase the chance of needing expensive medical treatment. It may also mean using up a bed that's needed for something completely unrelated to Covid (eg a heart attack).
On the last point, I guarantee you you'll be dealing with medical professionals who essentially have PTSD because they have to come to terms with the fact that they've chosen who gets to live and who gets to die because there simply aren't enough beds.
But sure, never mind that. There's a one in a million chance of an adverse reaction so screw em, basically.
This is a meaningless wall of text since you did not read my original message.
It is an attempt, one of so many, to victim blame. You might think that's not what you are doing because it is ok to attack any of the millions of statements like mine because in the end: each of them is an anecdote by themselves and since you make no effort to aggregate them. They always will remain that.
You are what's wrong in this situation.
Your anecdotal and marginal position is irrelevant because it fails to see the larger picture of available vaccines and complications. You are hyperfocused on myocarditis as if that is the only valid diagnosis of the issues we have or as if it was well known what the long term effects are of the un-named side effects caused.
I'm tired of this goalpost moving (mRNA vaccines against spike protein and the idea that the only side effect is myocarditis). And honestly if this is where you will hold your stand I think it's regretful you didn't suffer with us.
I've had crippling chest pains and ended up in the ER after a heartattack-like symptoms later to be determined as "spasms with unknown cause". My cardiologist can't diagnose it, says he need and MRI which I would have to pay for out of pocket.
3 months later and I can do some degree of exercise but not the same amounts as before. I know more people, that I meet in person, with similar symptoms, just lesser degree and they have recovered faster. A couple fully.
There is definitely something going on here that is not being talked about because it's inconvenient. It's unnecessary as it only happens with one specific type of vaccine applied to a specific part of the disease. The effects last long enough that it's worth being cautious.
The USDA and AHA recommended cutting out saturated fat for decades and eating 9-13 daily servings of bread and grain. The authorities you say all should blindly follow are grossly incompetent and shown to be wrong time and time again. How long has the medical field been failing with its reproducibility crisis? How many deaths per year are attributed to malpractice in the US?
If you want to listen to a bunch of well meaning morons and take their experimental treatment, have fun. The rest of us will appreciate your sacrifice up until the point you try to drag us into your suicidal cult.
> If you want to listen to a bunch of well meaning morons ...
Oh the irony. The sad reality is that anti-vaxxers are highly susceptible to being manipulated and that is actively happening by people who are completely hyprocritically doing so for their own personal gain.
Every living president (including Trump) and governor is vaccinated. All but 3 Senators are vaccinated. All but a handful of Congresspeople are vaccinated. Fox News has a vaccine mandate for their office. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham... all vaccinated.
Yet they're happy to play into irrational fears for their own empowerment and enrichment. That's all that's happening here.
Why do you assume I get information from the idiot box? Is it because that's where you get all of yours? You clearly have no idea what I was saying if your first statement tries to say the AHA is more of an authority than some TV taking head.
In #6, I'm not sure if Occam's razor is an actual proof of anything. Not countering the rest of the arguments, but I just can't see why Occam's razor should have any authority over anything except the things we already think are true.
First let me just say I hear you loud and clear. I think you might be reading into my position more then I intended.
My responses:
1: I agree. You really have to dig deep.
2: I agree. But you can at least assess risk vs other vaccines.
3: My point is that people should not be mandated to take that risk. The technology is good and fine but let people choose. This boils down to a collectivist vs
individualist argument. Largely western culture is born of prizing the individual over the collective. We have seen the horrors in the past of where collectivism leads.
4: I agree, it has to be an economic solution.
5: This is a complex statement to unwrap. I don't know anyone who isn't maybe a fervent Atheist Hedonist that thinks that unfettered selfishness is a virtue. Only sociopaths think that way by design and will justify it with whatever means necessary, be in intellectual or anti-intellectual. I will say that I don't like the fact that being against a mandate for ethical reasons as I pointed out automatically = anti-vax.
6: I agree. I don't like that fact that my opinion gets lumped in with people who think Bill Gates is a lizard trying to chip everyone. I do however think the "conspiracy" here is that the US public health authorities are going out of their way to squash any answer to this pandemic that is not a vaccine for the sake of reducing "vaccine hesitancy", the magic word. I would not be surprised if this was primary motivator and is admitted to years down the line, and its not necessarily the same as a "conspiracy" if this is the key term behind closed doors. Fauci already did the same with masks, first being anti-mask to protect the supply, then pro-mask once supplies were ample. He admitted to this himself. He also slowly creeped up the herd immunity % from 60% to 85%. When asked about this, he said he did it deliberately because "the American public couldn't handle the truth". That sort of logic is bad for public trust. Vaccine Hesitancy mitigation explains why any discussion of repurposed drugs, natural immunity, etc is shut out of the conversation. Look at how they are treating Mercks announcement of a new drug, with constant reminder that its no replacement for a vaccine. Why? In a "war" situation against a virus, why are not all options on the table? Why would you give a vaccine or even boosters to people with natural immunity when there are still entire countries waiting on theirs? This idea that the pandemic will end when 95% of the USA is vaccinated is ridiculous. You need global immunity. Its why Norway and Denmark have already accepted the disease and endemic, never going away.
7: Adenovirus vector technology (JJ, Astro-Zen shots) has only been recently adapted into a vaccine, same as mRNA. You cannot say there are no long term side effects based solely on a "drug vs immune response" durations. Trials of adenovirus vector based technology have failed in past trails. HIV vaccine based on this was a miserable failure. They tried using adenovirus based gene therapy on children on single gene mutations in in children, 40% got leukemia within 4 years. We dont even have 4 years of data for the current vaccine. I would agree they have somewhat passed the initial stages, albeit with with way worse VAERS profiles then any other vaccine in the last 50 years. Good enough though safety to give to people who want it, not force it on those who don't. The risk calculus is different for everyone especially given age and health.
8: Evidence where? Again, VASER is all we have because they opted to keep it as all we have. Like how they just banned Moderna for under 30 year olds in scandanavian countries and totally banned it in Iceland.
9: EUA has specific rules defined well before Covid. There cannot be any alternative treatments: Monoclonal antibodies, repurposed drugs, etc. Saying it went through "phase 3" trials means nothing when they cut out tons of checks in those trials. Cross-reactivity, Carcinogenic studies, to name a few.
10: Agreed VAERS is bad, but we have no other mechanism is my point. Really no issues identified? Not clots, not mycarditis, not nervous system issues, not GBS, nothing? I dont see how you can make that statement, its not true. Look at what just happen with Moderna in Europe. Go watch the FDA's publicly broadcast meeting regarding booster authorization. Every single doctor on the panel hammers the mycardidits point for boosters, and now we see Moderna getting pulled for it. The data is still trickling in. VAER is only between 1-5% of reported issues they estimate because it takes 30 minutes just to fill out the forms and most doctors wont bother, and its still abysmally bad for these vaccines.
I have a STEM degree in Physics and work in simulation. My wife is an ICU nurse. She also won't take it, along with 50% of the staff including the doctors at each hospital she floats to (more then 5 per week). Why? Because they witness the adverse events first hand, especially the mycarditis and clots. you can't just collectively dismiss their witnessed experience. I have made the point to her that she is at the epicenter aggregator of all those people but once you see it happen first hand you start to realize its not as rare as they say given that in a small enough town, there should only be a handful according to the CDC/FDA.
I think the rights of individuals to make their own choices should be upheld no matter the cost, otherwise we fall into this collectivist mindset that can justify anything it wants for "greater good". What if 5 years in we find out that the mRNA causes arterial and heart damage as some claim to have evidence for, and that some express the pulmonary conditions more immediately then others with mycarditis but everyone has some long term damage that will come back to haunt them. We would all be lamenting at how dumb we were to blindly trust a new technology adapted for a new use just because someone put the word "vaccine" on it and we all unquestionably trusted that. What if the intellectual objectors were the smart ones in the end? Careful that Darwins selection doesn't end up reversed in this case.
1. That only uneducated 'researchers' have concerns, and ill-formed ones. Petrovsky, as a leading vaccine developer, outlines a clear, educated position on why it's still reasonable to have concerns over the current options [1]
2. That because billions of doses have been administered, there are no serious problems. You can certainly make a very sound case that Covid side effects are worse in defence of using these current options. But they are irrefutably far less safe and effective (relatively) than any other vaccines authorised and widely used over the last few decades. Considering this it's understandable why there is still concern over overdone claims around the safety of the current options. Even in a pandemic numerous regulatory authorities have had to add additional warnings and modify use of the current options.
3. Your last cited point on Covid deaths is very wrong. You just need to look at UK statistics (and other countries) to realise there is something very, very odd about the claimed US stats from the CDC.
This is the fallacy in your argument. It's an infectious disease that spreads through the air. An infected individual will emit particles of the virus which will cause other people to become sick, permanently disabled or potentially die.
The rules of society are generally built around preventing and minimizing harm to other people. Sometimes that harm is intentional and obvious, like person A punching person B. Many times that harm is unintentional and non-obvious, which is why we need regulations to make buildings have safety-codes for how they're wired to the electric grid or controlling what chemicals can be emitted into the air or groundwater.
We don't let people say "it's my choice to drive drunk at 100mph (160km/h), if you want to drive slower and sober that's your choice" because when a drunk driver kills someone it's obvious to everyone the cause-effect and responsibility. Spreading a disease that kills someone is fundamentally the same thing, it's just not as obviously observable.
>This is the fallacy in your argument. It's an infectious disease that spreads through the air. An infected individual will emit particles of the virus which will cause other people to become sick, permanently disabled or potentially die.
This argument would be stronger if a) People who wanted to be vaccinated couldn't get the vaccine that protects them and b) if vaccinated people themselves weren't able to spread the virus too.
All in all you are cramming down a rushed vaccine down peoples throat at the risk of their livelihoods for marginal impacts in the virus's ability to spread and little significant risk to those who are already vaccinated.
We don't live in the society you describe. If it is fair to force people to take vaccines so that they wont spread the virus then it damn sure is fair to redistribute all the billionaires wealth to poor people. Because doing so would save many more lives than any vaccines ever could. We let the billionaires have their money, despite the cost to society so we must let people decide over their own bodies, despite the cost to society.
Actually what happened with the 2010 swine flu vaccine was that people developed narcolepsy starting about a year after the first shots were administered (many of them to people who were never at particularly high risk from the swine flu itself). It took about another year after those symptoms first arose for authorities to acknowledge the link to Pandemrix.
The reason damn near everyone except for adamant anti-vax have the perception that VACCINE=SAFE/GOOD is that 93% of experimental candidates are rejected and it takes 10-15 years of trails and data to get full approval. It's the reason you are confident giving it to your own children the safety standards are so stringent. These comparisons to your chances of car accidents and being struck by lighting are totally bogus, you need to compare the data to past vaccines! And yet we think we got this mRNA/Adenovirus vector formula right on the first try times 3 different brands with 2 years of reduced trials?
That's all gone out the window for the sake of the pandemic emergency and that's fine as long as the choice is clear and consensual, let those who want it take the risk, but don't mandate it. The VAERS data is abysmal, worse then the past 50 years of all vaccine combined, and yet people are now in the mode of dismissing the VAERS system entirely because its self reported, with no alternative to fall back to! The FDA even had the option of setting up a separate system for covid vaccine adverse event reporting and rejected it. Fine, then VAERS it is! The only system we have ever had to judge this by.
At what point is it ethical to hand someone a long list of side effects that occur at x50+ higher rates then past vaccines and then say "but you must take this or you can't work".
I think in 10 years, we will see this technology as higher risk but much faster turn around times compared to traditional vaccines. Just be up front about it and let people choose.