It is very important to note that in the state of New York, the trial court (the lowest level court) is called the Supreme Court. So while this ruling is notable, it is not the state’s highest court ruling on the matter. This ruling will be appealed by the government and likely reversed on appeal.
Then I guess that's it for requiring vaccination to attend school (which I thought was a thing for decades)? Or, is it just the Covid vaccines that were evil?
I'm old enough to have had all of the childhood diseases in childhood, with pneumonia and an ulcer thrown in (grade school was stressful I guess). Skip all of the vaccines and boosters you want, but be prepared for a couple of years of concern about sick kids. And some of the effects can last a lifetime.
> Or, is it just the Covid vaccines that were evil?
“Evil” is the wrong word, and is an attempt to simplify ad absurdum the reasons someone might not want the vaccine. These are some of the things that the Covid vaccines were, which those other vaccines aren’t:
- Months old
- New technology, more or less
- Subject to strange, changing messaging: it’ll protect you, then it won’t, then don’t wear a mask, then do, then maybe it won’t protect others, then there’s a (first, second) booster required and you still need a mask.
This can all be explained by science, I’m sure. But it’s disingenuous to pretend nothing was unique about the Covid vaccine to give people legitimate pause.
So it was new? The problem was covid wasn’t bad enough I guess. People would be running through walls to get a “new” Ebola vaccine, wouldn’t they. And there’s a number of covid vaccines that use older, well understood mechanisms that weren’t accepted either. It was political bs and the world is lucky it wasn’t worse. Pity about those than checked out, eh?
But it could have been. If the switch from delta to omicron went worse instead of better things would have turned out bad. I’m not comfortable playing at such high stakes. The virus just reproduces when and how it can.
Is the threshold in that specific neurone of yours really set to a level such that any $foo "not as bad as ebola" is always failing the "if $foo was bad" test?
> > But it could have been
> But it wasn’t! Hooray!
Same argument applies to Russian roulette.
Strange game. No idea why people chose to play it, not even metaphorically.
For covid: average age at death > average life expectancy. Really think about what that means.
If we counted flu deaths like we counted COVID deaths (i.e. anyone testing positive who died, died of covid), you would have a similar, terrifying death count for the flu. But people still wouldn't be afraid of it.
Not because they're stupid, but because your measurement ("six million dead"!) fails to capture the reality of the situation: the chance of a healthy under 70 dying of covid was negligible. And people behaved logically given this reality.
The world is much bigger than just the USA, and does not have any interest in conspiracies like that, with nations that hate each other reporting fairly similar results.
But let's just pretend all those numbers are meaningless. The obvious alternative measure is excess mortality. If I went by excess mortality rate, the number would be 9.5 to 18.6 million. But not, just in case you were going to go there, from the lockdowns.
Conversely, the statistics show that vaccines prevented about 14.4-19.8 million deaths.
But you know what, let's ignore that too.
When you say:
> the chance of a healthy under 70 dying of covid was negligible. And people behaved logically given this reality.
If one really think those risks count as negligible, why be afraid of the vaccines? Every vaccine anyone is allowed to offer to you is a lower risk than the disease. This is true for COVID, it is true for seasonal influenza, it is true for measles. That's how the various drug and medicine safety organisations worldwide work, what they are for, and the fundamental point of them.
For the average age at death to be above life expectancy, virtually everyone who died "of" covid must have been elderly. And because humans don't live that long, the numbers of elderly who died must massively exceed the number of young people for that stat to skew so high.
I don't know if you read your link, but it makes my point perfectly. As a practical matter, the only people that died with covid were those so frail that they would have died anyway. This has always been the case for other mild but highly transmissible illnesses, such as the flu. It seems clear to me that if it wasn't for the unprecedented manner by which these deaths were attributed, the pandemic would have been indistinguishable from a bad flu season.
"Every vaccine anyone is allowed to offer to you is a lower risk than the disease." ... "That's how the various drug and medicine safety organisations worldwide work, what they are for, and the fundamental point of them."
And that's why they have objectively failed. You don't account for incompetent or corrupt authorities. Or that different products, both called "vaccine" can have different risks and benefits. The covid vaccine is nothing like the measles vaccines, by any metric.
"If one really think those risks count as negligible, why be afraid of the vaccines?"
... The risk of covid being negligible puts an upper limit on the potential benefit of the vaccine, but says nothing about it's safety. The risk of the vaccine is not zero, and for certain groups, ie. Young men, is quite significant (and no, not exceeded by covid).
> I don't know if you read your link, but it makes my point perfectly
By directly contradicting you? No, I don't think I've misread it, I think you saw a few key words and decided you were right all along.
> It seems clear to me that if it wasn't for the unprecedented manner by which these deaths were attributed, the pandemic would have been indistinguishable from a bad flu season.
It's about six or seven times worse than influenza, and influenza is only tolerated because of the human tenancy to treat bad things we grew up with as inevitable.
> And that's why they have objectively failed. You don't account for incompetent or corrupt authorities
The authorities generally agreeing with each other does this for me.
They do not have a reason to cooperate in a conspiracy, several are of nations actively at war with each other.
> The risk of the vaccine is not zero,
Absolutist attitudes are a common cognitive bias, but an unhelpful and unhealthy one.
"Zero risk"? That's not how reality works. And furthermore…
> and for certain groups, ie. Young men, is quite significant (and no, not exceeded by covid).
… are you familiar with the difference between "statistically significant" and "large"?
The graphs in what you linked to are showing that the big spike in cases peaks at… 10 extra acute coronary syndrome calls per week, and 3 extra cardiac arrest calls per week.
The COVID IFR for men between 20 and 24 is 0.008%, and between 25-39 is 0.017% so I'm going to approximate the average for 18-31 as the mean of those because I don't have the actual number.
The male population of Israel in that age range is about 780k, which means that without vaccination the disease would have killed about 97.5 Israeli men in that age range.
Versus the literally dozens you're citing as a reason to be terrified.
Of course, in the future mRNA vaccines won’t be new technology at all, and so people rejecting them will probably be remember similarly to people who refused to wear seatbelts when they were new.
Maybe! The fact that everyone "knows" that doesn't is the 1st concern. Even scientists are not clear on efficacy or long term beneficial/averse effects. Nobody knows why all previous mRNA vaccines were ineffective, yet, the Covid jabs are. Lots of questions still remain.
What previous mRNA vaccines? And it’s being used to deploy cancer treatments. If it can use the body’s mechanisms to make drug matter rather than dosing, think of the efficiency. Particularly outside the richest countries.
We make all sorts of things medical and otherwise by adapting biochemistry. Nobody seemed to mind before.
The reason the majority of people didn't mind before is because testing & trials were stringently enforced. I, myself, have had numerous vaccines, required & optional.
Previous post edit: Freudian slip, meant to convey unfavorable, but typed averse.
>The concept of using mRNA to produce useful proteins to fight disease has been around for decades. But until now, no vaccines using this technology have made it this far in clinical trials. The success of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines “is really good for the RNA field, because until very recently, there were just a handful of people who really believed in mRNA vaccines,”
There have always been exceptions made for vaccine refusal in schools - until 2021 Marin County CA had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, and students got exemptions.
Also, the vaccines that have been traditionally required for school are proven to “work” in the sense that they immunize one against the disease, thus eliminating spread.
The COVID vaccines don’t do that. Most people who get COVID these days are vaccinated, and they still spread it.
A highly experiential vaccine with no known long term research. Almost no research trials at all. It came out after many people had already been exposed. Yet still forcing them to take it.
Now we find out they did NOT test if it slows transmission.
From evidence. It clearly doesn’t help.
Now a ton of weird heart issues are starting up in younger populations that weren’t at serious risk anyway.
This isn’t science. It’s attempt to control people.
It should have been encouraged but not forced.
It’s completely evil how this topic was used to divide the nation.
The pushers of antivaxx perhaps, but even then the meme itself (bear with me) is strong enough that there were numerous enough anti-vaxxers to make a difference (and I'm not just counting COVID here).
For why the meme alone makes it important to be kind: Just because I can only explain the pushers with conflict theory and neo-phobia, and just because I find those things to be incomprehensible, (1) sane people can still be convinced by such people (my MMR was delayed because whatshisname did actually get published), and (2) it's common enough to count as part of the human condition.
