It worked incredibly well. Substantially better and less risky than traditional inactivated-virus vaccines which we used prior. And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown, which genuinely was a huge encroachment on human freedom for a gain that wasn't worth its cost. I have …
It worked incredibly well. Substantially better and less risky than traditional inactivated-virus vaccines which we used prior. And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown, which genuinely was a huge encroachment on human freedom for a gain that wasn't worth its cost. I have no problem supporting, and continuing to support, a vaccine mandate. Especially when the alternative is continued needless death versus genuinely minor personal inconvenience.
Bray Wyatt, a celebrity pro-wrestler, died last year primarily because he refused to get the Covid vaccine.* He left behind a wife and four kids over an illness he could've easily avoided. That's not like the lockdown at all. Only cretins pretend there's a genuine tradeoff in this case.
* He also refused to take proper care of himself after his illness, but he never would've gotten the illness had he had the vaccine.
I sometimes wonder whether the mere word 'vaccine' has magical powers. Significant numbers of, albeit not very influential, people will, when told a given medicine is a vaccine, attribute to it almost limitlessly malign powers. On the other hand, an even larger group of rather more influential people are willing to declare any pharmaceutical product, no matter how patently mediocre, to be miraculous and 'incredibly' effective so long as it has the magic v-word attached. There's even the interesting phenomenon of both pro and anti-jabbers combing the internet for random stories of people dying to prove their point.
Normal people, however, have a rough working model of whether a vaccine works. If they get vaccinated and they get the disease, and they get a booster, and get the disease, then another booster, and get the disease they conclude it's a dud. That's why Germany has already disposed of 83,000,000 unused vaccine doses and is literally paying Pfizer not to send them any more while American status-conscious strivers fall over themselves to declare, after getting a cold that they have been injected against seven times, that they would, sans this 'incredible' vaccine, have probably died.
The lucky thing is that most people aren't even vindictive about this. They just want to move on and pretend it didn't happen. But vaccine worshippers can't stop bringing it up like a bad tic.
The vaccine reduces the chance of serious risk and death by 90%. However, only the old and sick were at serious risk of disease and death to start with, so for everyone else 10% of basically nothing is basically nothing.
That we were firing people for not getting a shot that had no impact on their lives is insane.
During the actual vaccine mandate hysteria a lot of this boiled down to a concerted misinformation campaign by the left to tout the sterilizing effects of the vaccine. If the vaccine could prevent you from getting and transmitting COVID then there might be some reason for a mandate. But the evidence was never there for it if one was being honest, and what little evidence there was collapsed the second a new variant came along.
I think the entire thing was done in the hope that "beating" COVID with SCIENCE and blaming everything on the unvaxxed was part of an electoral strategy that backfired. Once the Nov 2021 elections showed it wasn't working people started quietly looking for a face saving exit.
Plenty of people who were under 60 and weren't fat died of Covid: Adam Schlesinger, Carlos Marín, Jay Jay Phillips, Siti Sarah, Chris Trousdale. There's also a fairly good chance it was Brodie Lee's real cause of death, and it ultimately caused the heart problem that killed Bray Wyatt, who only died last year because HE REFUSED TO TAKE THE COVID VACCINE.
So no, I don't have any sympathy for opposition to a Covid vaccine mandate. If anything, we were way too lax on that point. The stoking of opposition to it was either cynical politics, disbelieved even by those pushing it (hence why the likes of DJT and Tucker Carlson got it for themselves); or a sign of groundless, self-destructive paranoia, worthy of the dumbest and craziest postcolonial African dictator.
First of all, to me, yes obviously. Secondly, though, and more pertinently, the point of citing these names is to show that Covid was a big deal that hit young, healthy people. But it falls flat because no-one you have actually heard of died of it, because it wasn't actually a big deal.
I know some people who died of Covid. They were all very old, and compared to the old people I know who died of something other than Covid it was a great mercy.
There are only a couple of hundred thousand death of people under age 65 (most age 50+ with obesity and health conditions).
There is no way that justified lockdowns and school closures and masking.
I was in a state that switched over to a Republican governor in Nov 2021. In addition to this resulting in less direct COVID NPIs from the change in leadership, it was also part of the broader electoral rejection that got democrats to start giving up on NPIs.
About 3/4 of the people who voted GOP in that election opposed vaccine mandates. If we told all of them we didn't want their votes we would still be masking kids in schools.
I don't give a fuck about what you want or your dumb opinions. I give a fuck about what works, and what the tradeoffs are. The Lockdow, though it somewhat reduced the spread, wasn't worth the cost, and should've been limited to the elderly and the immunocompromized rather than forced on the entire population. The vaccine took a hypercontagious, fast-mutating virus that killed more people than our Civil War and our WWII effort combined, and turned it into a non-issue that requires no sacrifice on our parts. Therefore, I completely support mandates, and have no patience for anyone stupid or cynical enough to start a bodily-autonomy panic over life-saving medicine. Especially since I'm not running for office, I don't have to be nice to retards for political purposes.
In understand the it's difficult to maintain a centre of uncertainty, especially in a partisan environment where political affiliation quickly became a substitute for healthy scientific scepticism, but it's important to remember that objective truth is nuanced with regard to the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines, and those of us who are highly intelligent tend to be more prone to motivational biases, not less so.
Here are a few salient points. Without a doubt, mRNA vaccines saved a huge number of people in the over-fifties category, and it's a public health tragedy that many conservatives and Black people were convinced by political mistrust and understandable concerns, in the latter case, not to get vaccinated.
But if we look at the other end of spectrum, it is easy to see that it's highly probably that for anyone under the age of 30 and healthy, vaccines were a net health negative. Remember because of Astra Zeneca and thrombosis we in the UK were given access to better statistical risks from Covid- if you were under 30 and healthy, risks of death from Covid for the original variant were 1 in 650K.
One study was particularly good at comparing risks- if you were unvaccinated and male between the ages of 16 and 22 then the risks of being hospitalised from Covid were 0.3 in 100K. Meanwhile, if you were 16 to 22, male and receiving a booster shot risks of hospitalisation from vaccination were 10 in 100K, mainly though myocarditis and pericarditis.
You probably believe that there were no deaths at all from Covid vaccinations. This is simply not the case. The British government itself has admitted that there have been at least a few deaths from mRNA vaccines, although the ONS data they've confirmed on official government websites is admittedly miniscule, compared to total vaccines administered.
However, there is notable difference between the exceptionally high burdens of proof for causation for medical and legal purposes and the far more accurate source of going direct to actuarial data. The best single source available is Ed Dowd's 'Causes Unknown'. although I would be the first to admit that it's a biased source, highly salacious and emotive in picking out a plethora of anecdotal and emotive stories of sudden deaths. particularly amongst the young. On balance though, the actuarial data sources are quite compelling, so it's very much a mixed bag.
Generally, the establishment response to this damning data is to deflect with long Covid. Another favoured tactic is to point to Sweden's exceptionally low excess mortality rates. This is valid point. Sweden had quite a high rate of vaccine uptake. However, the data from Australia contradicts these two valid arguments. Australia didn't really much in the way of Covid transmission prior to vaccination, and the data does show sudden spikes in death in the months during which the vaccine was rolled out, especially in the under 44 age categories, with the highest risks found in males between 12 and 22 (from other sources).
Two things are happening at once. The Right is completely ignoring the proven life-saving effects of vaccinations in the over 50s category. At the same time, the Left is ignoring a relatively smaller wave of deaths from vaccinations amongst the under 44s. Admittedly this trend is small- at most probably somewhere around the 10,000 mark in total for America. And to be fair, it's not wrong for them to dismiss this concern given the data made available to them.
All the major search engines hide scientific papers showing harms from mRNA vaccines. Even the scientific journals themselves are prone to the same phenomenon, with the likes of the Lancet et al quickly withdrawing perfectly valid scientific papers on the grounds of receiving pressure from scientists and institutions already committed to the false perfectly safe and effective narrative. The actual data tends to contradict this hypothesis, but by nowhere near the degree that the Right believes.
Here's the thing, it's highly likely that those vaccine death aren't a product of innate flaws in the vaccine, but rather a number of minor factors which worked in concert. First, it was a really, really bad idea to lockdown people against general immunological exposure. The immune system is anti-fragile- it requires constant pressure to maintain healthy equilibrium. Lockdowns were tantamount to telling a professional athlete to continue to eat 4,000 calories a day for several months, before then, through vaccination, telling him to compete in an Iron Man event. And we know that something like this did occur, from the massive spike in RSV hospitalisations in the fall season following the cessation of lockdown measures.
The second factor was production processes. There is great Danish/Dutch paper out there which looks at ADRs in relation to the size of batch runs for vaccines. It shows that almost all of the ADRs were concentrated towards the small batch run end of the graph, with larger batch runs carrying risks an order of magnitude lower than smaller batch runs. What's the betting that green drug manufacturers released vaccines which they believed to be only slightly less efficacious or more likely to provoke a minor ADR, when in actuality they didn't realise that they were releasing vaccines which had a still admittedly very low risk of causing a fatality.
What people forget is that the hysteria probably motivated Public Health Agencies to dismiss rare genuine concerns out of a justifiable feat that hesitancy would cause deaths. The other thing to consider is that at the point that the UK passed the milestone of 150K deaths attributed to Covid, a FOI request showed that of these deaths roughly 17K were from Covid alone. There is of course a second group where Covid represented a tipping point that stole a patients life perhaps five years prematurely, but it is still likely that reporting methods overestimated Covid deaths by a factor of 2.
In all probability vaccination probably saved around 100K per year in America, up until the advent of Omicron for which we had only an epidemiological suspicion that it would occur and no frame of reference for when it would occur. These prevented deaths would have been overwhelmingly in the over 50s category. By contrast, the actuarial data shows that vaccinations probably caused around 10,00 deaths per year, mainly concentrated in the under 45 age category.
I know you will probably disagree with this very rough guesstimate. I do however believe you to be a rational individual more likely to look at reasoned arguments and evidence, as opposed to the hurled invectives and ad hominem attacks typical of most exchanges over Covid as a subject. Look at the data from Dowd. It's difficult to dismiss entirely, even if much of the book is padded with emotive newspaper articles. The data, however, is mostly sound.
FYI- sudden deaths did occur amongst the young pre-Covid. It was an already alarming trend which was growing year on year, mainly because of increases in childhood obesity and diabetes. But long Covid and the bad health habits incurred by lockdowns are simply not sufficient to explain a statistical sevenfold spike in sudden deaths amongst the under 45s which just happened to occur during the months of vaccine rollout.
You're also, of course, completely right about the Great Barrington Declaration. Before the pandemic, the isolation of solely the vulnerable formed the basis of all epidemiological mitigation planning.
"The vaccine took a hypercontagious, fast-mutating virus that killed more people than our Civil War and our WWII effort combined, and turned it into a non-issue that requires no sacrifice on our parts." The covid vaccines had jack-all to do with that. Covid was always going to mutate to become less virulent just like the Spanish flu did, and that would have happened without any vaccines (even ones that work, which the mRNA vaccines do not work and don't stop the spread of the disease).
You are so wrong it would be comical if it weren’t so serious. IRL when I run into someone like you I sadly think ‘too bad. Dead man walking here.’ At some point you will wake up. But likely it will be too late for you and or your dying family member.
"but he never would've gotten the illness had he had the vaccine."
You literally said that after having been vaccinated 5[?] times you were 'as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever'. Are you trying to make sense?
That's cause I was a reasonably healthy kid. I wasn't a cancer patient or a malaria survivor or something. I never had mumps, I never had measles, I never had rubella, I had a fairly manageable case of chicken pocks, and I didn't need my tonsils or appendix removed.
And I wasn't vaccinated five times. I was vaccinated once -- the first shot and the post-month booster -- before getting Covid the first time when a new wave broke out. I got it twice later, and wouldn't get a new shot until last week, but that was motivated by laziness.
I never had measles too, because I was vaccinated against it. Same with rubella and everything else I have been vaccinated against. That is a good indication *that these vaccines actually work*.
You didn't get measles again because the measles virus doesn't mutate that much. Indeed, it mutates so little that even people who had it as children, which pretty much everybody did before the '70s, are unlikely to ever get it again.
For viruses that mutate frequently -- such as coronaviruses like the cold and Covid, or HIV -- traditional vaccines will never be as reliable as mRNA or vector or subunit vaccines. Hence why the Chinese Covid vaccine, which is a traditional vaccine, is notorious for being worthless horsepiss.
We finally have a reliable vaccine against HIV on the horizon, and retard rightoids like you are actively fighting on the side of preventing its dissemination. This is the reason why the Right keeps losing.
I can't quite believe this needs to be said, but the function of medicine is to prevent or cure illness, not to achieve some goal under laboratory conditions. If a given virus mutates sufficiently quickly that it will overcome the protection of a given vaccine within a few months *that means the vaccine doesn't work*. You don't get some get-out-of-jail-free card where you say 'this vaccine would work great if it wasn't for this virus mutating'; the vaccine is supposed to deal with the virus that actually exists. The fact that traditional vaccines are even more ineffective against Covid does not mean that this vaccine is effective.
Now, as too your other points., I haven't read much about the prospects for an HIV vaccine, and it's not important to think about because we already have a 99,999% effective vaccine called 'not being a promiscuous homosexual and/or doing intravenous drugs'. I appreciate your concern that my being in much better health than you, and not taking a vaccine that - by your own admission - offers effectively no protection against severe illness even within a few months is the reason the Right keeps losing. However, personally, I don't think it's possible for the Right to win, and it wouldn't be a good thing if it did.
The right controls about 40 out of 50 States. It would control the Presidency too without cheating. Day to day stuff, the States have more influence on you. Cities are Dem controlled. That is starting to change as their policies destroy one city after another. School boards are now starting to switch over. Your statement that is why the right keeps losing is not reality based.
"And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown"
The vast majority of people that oppose vaccine mandates also opposed lockdowns. And the vast majority of people that support vaccine mandates supported lockdowns. The Venn diagram of pro-vaccine mandate, anti-lockdown was very small, completely electorally insignificant, and composed almost entirely of people that while they complained about lockdowns on twitter continued to vote for democratic politicians that imposed lockdowns.
The meaningful divide on COVID was between people that "thought it was a big deal" vs people who "didn't think it was a big deal". Vaccines indeed reduced the risk of COVID by 90%, but if you overestimated the risk of COVID by 10,000% that didn't change your calculus.
Many young healthy liberals considered the chance of being hospitalized for COVID to be 50%, and believed Long Covid would cripple them for life.
Meanwhile, if you considered COVID not a big deal, then 10% of not a big deal is still not a big deal, so no change.
There is an analogy to police shooting of blacks. The actual number of police shootings of unarmed black men is 10-20 a year (many justified anyway). About 50% of liberals believe that the number is over 1,000. Over 20% think 10,000 or more. If you could give these people a vaccine that reduced their estimate of black men killed by the police by 90%, they would still be wildly overshooting. That's what it was like with COVID. The vaccine didn't move the needle on COVID hysteria at all for the vast majority of the left. The only thing that worked was a combination of doing terrible in the Nov 2021 elections (because all those vaccine mandate deniers voted against them) and they all got Omicron anyway that winter and realized it wasn't a big deal.
I'm sorry but what I saw during COVID was extreme cowardice on the part of liberals. Either they became outright COVID scolds, or they complained mildly while trying to bash the right to keep their leftist cred.
Covid isn't remotely like police shootings. We have about a thousand fatal police shootings in the US per year, mostly of armed men. Over a million people died in the first two years of Covid in the US alone. More than we lost in WWII and the Civil War combined. It's like comparing police shootings to deaths in trampoline accidents.
Also, I did have Omicron, after getting vaccinated (for Delta, months prior), and it absolutely was a big deal, even though I'm neither old nor obese. I was as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever. It was worse than any time I've had pneumonia.
Because as sick as I was, I still missed the worst symptoms: I kept my senses of smell and taste, I didn't have chest pain, I didn't have oxygen deprivation so I didn't need an inhaler or nebulizer (which I did need when I had pneumonia), my skin never turned blue, and I suffered no noticeable permanent damage afterwards. I had huge fatigue, an endless and unquenchable thirst, chills, fever, soreness, congestion, and it lasted forever (longer than any time I've had pneumonia), but I was still able to handle it by staying home. Which was good, because it's not like the hospital could do much for me, nor did they need to waste their time with someone who could get better on his own.
Second time, when I wasn't up to date on vaccination, I ended up with all those symptoms again, plus a compromise to my sense of taste. Everything tasted spoiled. But thankfully, it lasted a lot shorter. I also gave it to my whole family, but they were all either up to date with their vaccinations or immunised by having too recent a case, so they all barely had any symptoms. Had it again early this winter, when I also hadn't been up to date on my vaccination, and I wasn't as sick as either the first or second time, but it lasted even longer than the first, so I got an inhaler and a humidifier to help with the linger.
OK, you do realise that you are supposed to be defending the vaccines right? This is literally what I mean when I say these vaccines don't work very well. Though I said it flippantly, it genuinely does sound like your immune system is bad. From one human to another: for a blood test for vitamin D and supplement if necessary, take regular walks, make sure to get exposure to sunlight especially in winter, and try to remove stressful things from your life.
By the way, I am not vaccinated and I think I had Covid twice (don't really know because I never too a test). The first time (probably Delta) was nothing. The second time I took a day off work because my wife said I should. Covid is not an important problem at all.
A bunch of old sick people died. Probably made the country better. Defiantly not worth masking kids. The cost/benefit ratio of COVID policy was awful.
I had Omicron too. It felt like a bad flu, and the disease didn't feel much worse then getting the vaccine (which made me and my wife very sick, everyone seems to gloss over the fact that its the only vaccine I've ever taken that made me extremely ill).
I've often found myself wondering what a national leader of 50 years ago would have said has an aide come to his office and described this new Covid pandemic:
"So, basically, a lot of people who would have 'lived' to 84 requiring constant medical interventions are actually going to die at 82"
Vaccine reactions vary. I had a day’s hangover. Immune responses also differ. Some people get nearly complete immunity, some get less.
The kicker is that Covid is of the same family of viruses as the common cold. Coronaviruses mutate constantly. We expect to catch colds each year.
This particular coronavirus was more deadly because it was novel, in a similar way that native Americans died in droves from European diseases like the common cold.
Vaccination gives us a base level of protection in general, just as flu vaccines do. The manufacturers target the strains they think most people will encounter.
"I was as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever. It was worse than any time I've had pneumonia." And yet it doesn't occur to you that you got this sick BECAUSE of the vaccine? Or that in the least, the vaccine didn't work? I'm unvaccinated, I was exposed to covid for 2 weeks at home, never tested positive, and I have a chronic illness to boot.
See, your vaunted vaccine likely made you sicker with covid because the mRNA makes you TOLERANT to the spike protein, so you won't have a cytokine storm, but you can't kick the virus out properly either.
I just don't get the psychology of people who get this sick after a vaccine and think the vaccine still works. The vaccine is NOT WORKING. If it did work, you wouldn't be getting sick at all!
It quite literally did not work. It didn’t do what they said it would do, an it still doesn’t do what they are saying jt will do.
Never mind the enormous increase in excess death and disability corresponding exactly to the vaccine roll out. You’re quite frankly delusional if you actually believe the mRNA shots “worked incredibly well”. Complete indefensible position.
The vaccine did work incredibly well. It was the most sophisticated fascistic business venture and sociological experiment of our time. Hundreds of governments taking the testimony of bureaucrats who were currently or previously employed by a handful of pharmaceutical companies that their new products, developed in about 6 months, would save the human race from the virus and even prevent everyone who accepted Jesus as their Lo, er, everyone who accepted a vaccination from contracting the virus at all. These governments preceded to mandate this product to over 7 billion people with differing levels of severity depending on the country, from causing uncooperative individuals to lose their jobs to barricading them in their apartments until they relented. Thankfully, millions of elderly people were spared from the virus, but I can’t help but suspect this was not the primary motive here. Based simply on this most basic outline of events, what happened here is one of the most seamless and effective public-private partnerships and fastest transfer of wealth in history. The sovereign scientific decrees of the time continue to be quietly walked back every few months, but the vaccine performed beyond all expectations. The main question is, for whom?
The right wins almost every election. State Governors? More and more every election top to bottom has gone right. Trump beat Joe by a mile. But the election was stolen. Obviously. Almost NO ONE believes in what progressives believe. Men should not compete against women in sports. It doesn’t matter if they change their name to a female name. And dress up. Boys should not have their penises cut off because a psychologist says he will be happier. The border should be closed. And so on. The vast vast majority of people are on the same side. And it isn’t the side of the left. Last, the vaccines are the worst medicines ever foisted on mankind. The fallout will effect mankind for at least three generations. If you keep getting boosted you will die.
"Trump beat Joe by a mile. But the election was stolen."
Fucking LOL.
No wonder smart people don't wanna lump up with retards like you. A guy who couldn't even win the popular vote the first time around against a historically unpopular and unlikable Dem challenger, whose highest-ever approval rating was 49%, who drove off college-educated and suburban voters like no other Rep since Goldwater (who at least had integrity), whose own wife cited rape as the reason for their divorce when adultery was a perfectly viable option, and you think he ever had the majority on his side?
Thank fuck I'm not an office holder. I don't need to win over retards like you. My goal is to win over the people who live on Planet Earth. Perhaps you can join us someday when you get tired of failure.
Your own personal experience is irrelevant when compared with the averages. On average, the Left dominates every high-Q profession, has done so for at least living memory, probably a lot longer (JS Mill called the Tories "the Stupid Party", and he died in 1873), and the Right's response to this has been to pander to the retard flank harder than ever. This holds true in IQ surveys as well.
The only reason things might change is that the Right's pro-stupidity has grown in tandem with the Left's anti-hereditarianism. And militant anti-hereditarianism is incompatible with being a stable, happy home for a cognitive minority, whether on the left or right end of the Bell Curve.
By the way, I love how RINO has become the default insult of the retard right when you've rallied around a guy who spent most of his adult life as either a Dem or an Independent, whom primarily won his nomination by jettisoning most of the conservative platform of the last century aside from chauvinism and anti-immigrationism. You Retardlicans could at least pick a somewhat accurate insult.
"Bray Wyatt, a celebrity pro-wrestler, died last year primarily because he refused to get the Covid vaccine.*" Where did you get this information? Because it's certainly not available via any search I've done.
He ultimately died of a heart attack, but may very well have survived that had he worn his damnded heart monitor while he was sleeping like his doctors told him to:
Presumably the reason more attention wasn't drawn to this is because, while tragic, Bray's death was both extraordinarily stupid and exceptionally selfish, neither of which are things grieving friends and families like to bring up about their deceased if it can be avoided.
It worked incredibly well. Substantially better and less risky than traditional inactivated-virus vaccines which we used prior. And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown, which genuinely was a huge encroachment on human freedom for a gain that wasn't worth its cost. I have no problem supporting, and continuing to support, a vaccine mandate. Especially when the alternative is continued needless death versus genuinely minor personal inconvenience.
Bray Wyatt, a celebrity pro-wrestler, died last year primarily because he refused to get the Covid vaccine.* He left behind a wife and four kids over an illness he could've easily avoided. That's not like the lockdown at all. Only cretins pretend there's a genuine tradeoff in this case.
* He also refused to take proper care of himself after his illness, but he never would've gotten the illness had he had the vaccine.
I sometimes wonder whether the mere word 'vaccine' has magical powers. Significant numbers of, albeit not very influential, people will, when told a given medicine is a vaccine, attribute to it almost limitlessly malign powers. On the other hand, an even larger group of rather more influential people are willing to declare any pharmaceutical product, no matter how patently mediocre, to be miraculous and 'incredibly' effective so long as it has the magic v-word attached. There's even the interesting phenomenon of both pro and anti-jabbers combing the internet for random stories of people dying to prove their point.
Normal people, however, have a rough working model of whether a vaccine works. If they get vaccinated and they get the disease, and they get a booster, and get the disease, then another booster, and get the disease they conclude it's a dud. That's why Germany has already disposed of 83,000,000 unused vaccine doses and is literally paying Pfizer not to send them any more while American status-conscious strivers fall over themselves to declare, after getting a cold that they have been injected against seven times, that they would, sans this 'incredible' vaccine, have probably died.
The lucky thing is that most people aren't even vindictive about this. They just want to move on and pretend it didn't happen. But vaccine worshippers can't stop bringing it up like a bad tic.
The vaccine reduces the chance of serious risk and death by 90%. However, only the old and sick were at serious risk of disease and death to start with, so for everyone else 10% of basically nothing is basically nothing.
That we were firing people for not getting a shot that had no impact on their lives is insane.
During the actual vaccine mandate hysteria a lot of this boiled down to a concerted misinformation campaign by the left to tout the sterilizing effects of the vaccine. If the vaccine could prevent you from getting and transmitting COVID then there might be some reason for a mandate. But the evidence was never there for it if one was being honest, and what little evidence there was collapsed the second a new variant came along.
I think the entire thing was done in the hope that "beating" COVID with SCIENCE and blaming everything on the unvaxxed was part of an electoral strategy that backfired. Once the Nov 2021 elections showed it wasn't working people started quietly looking for a face saving exit.
Plenty of people who were under 60 and weren't fat died of Covid: Adam Schlesinger, Carlos Marín, Jay Jay Phillips, Siti Sarah, Chris Trousdale. There's also a fairly good chance it was Brodie Lee's real cause of death, and it ultimately caused the heart problem that killed Bray Wyatt, who only died last year because HE REFUSED TO TAKE THE COVID VACCINE.
So no, I don't have any sympathy for opposition to a Covid vaccine mandate. If anything, we were way too lax on that point. The stoking of opposition to it was either cynical politics, disbelieved even by those pushing it (hence why the likes of DJT and Tucker Carlson got it for themselves); or a sign of groundless, self-destructive paranoia, worthy of the dumbest and craziest postcolonial African dictator.
Woah, Carlos Marin died. CARLOS MARIN? Now that I know Carlos Marin died, I am now very afraid of Covid.
Seriously though, who was Carlos Marin, or any of the people on that list?
My thoughts exactly- who are these 5 people, apparently representative of something significant??? This guy is too much😂
Because you don't know who they are, their deaths are less meaningful?
First of all, to me, yes obviously. Secondly, though, and more pertinently, the point of citing these names is to show that Covid was a big deal that hit young, healthy people. But it falls flat because no-one you have actually heard of died of it, because it wasn't actually a big deal.
I know some people who died of Covid. They were all very old, and compared to the old people I know who died of something other than Covid it was a great mercy.
There are only a couple of hundred thousand death of people under age 65 (most age 50+ with obesity and health conditions).
There is no way that justified lockdowns and school closures and masking.
I was in a state that switched over to a Republican governor in Nov 2021. In addition to this resulting in less direct COVID NPIs from the change in leadership, it was also part of the broader electoral rejection that got democrats to start giving up on NPIs.
About 3/4 of the people who voted GOP in that election opposed vaccine mandates. If we told all of them we didn't want their votes we would still be masking kids in schools.
I don't give a fuck about what you want or your dumb opinions. I give a fuck about what works, and what the tradeoffs are. The Lockdow, though it somewhat reduced the spread, wasn't worth the cost, and should've been limited to the elderly and the immunocompromized rather than forced on the entire population. The vaccine took a hypercontagious, fast-mutating virus that killed more people than our Civil War and our WWII effort combined, and turned it into a non-issue that requires no sacrifice on our parts. Therefore, I completely support mandates, and have no patience for anyone stupid or cynical enough to start a bodily-autonomy panic over life-saving medicine. Especially since I'm not running for office, I don't have to be nice to retards for political purposes.
In understand the it's difficult to maintain a centre of uncertainty, especially in a partisan environment where political affiliation quickly became a substitute for healthy scientific scepticism, but it's important to remember that objective truth is nuanced with regard to the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines, and those of us who are highly intelligent tend to be more prone to motivational biases, not less so.
Here are a few salient points. Without a doubt, mRNA vaccines saved a huge number of people in the over-fifties category, and it's a public health tragedy that many conservatives and Black people were convinced by political mistrust and understandable concerns, in the latter case, not to get vaccinated.
But if we look at the other end of spectrum, it is easy to see that it's highly probably that for anyone under the age of 30 and healthy, vaccines were a net health negative. Remember because of Astra Zeneca and thrombosis we in the UK were given access to better statistical risks from Covid- if you were under 30 and healthy, risks of death from Covid for the original variant were 1 in 650K.
One study was particularly good at comparing risks- if you were unvaccinated and male between the ages of 16 and 22 then the risks of being hospitalised from Covid were 0.3 in 100K. Meanwhile, if you were 16 to 22, male and receiving a booster shot risks of hospitalisation from vaccination were 10 in 100K, mainly though myocarditis and pericarditis.
You probably believe that there were no deaths at all from Covid vaccinations. This is simply not the case. The British government itself has admitted that there have been at least a few deaths from mRNA vaccines, although the ONS data they've confirmed on official government websites is admittedly miniscule, compared to total vaccines administered.
However, there is notable difference between the exceptionally high burdens of proof for causation for medical and legal purposes and the far more accurate source of going direct to actuarial data. The best single source available is Ed Dowd's 'Causes Unknown'. although I would be the first to admit that it's a biased source, highly salacious and emotive in picking out a plethora of anecdotal and emotive stories of sudden deaths. particularly amongst the young. On balance though, the actuarial data sources are quite compelling, so it's very much a mixed bag.
Generally, the establishment response to this damning data is to deflect with long Covid. Another favoured tactic is to point to Sweden's exceptionally low excess mortality rates. This is valid point. Sweden had quite a high rate of vaccine uptake. However, the data from Australia contradicts these two valid arguments. Australia didn't really much in the way of Covid transmission prior to vaccination, and the data does show sudden spikes in death in the months during which the vaccine was rolled out, especially in the under 44 age categories, with the highest risks found in males between 12 and 22 (from other sources).
Two things are happening at once. The Right is completely ignoring the proven life-saving effects of vaccinations in the over 50s category. At the same time, the Left is ignoring a relatively smaller wave of deaths from vaccinations amongst the under 44s. Admittedly this trend is small- at most probably somewhere around the 10,000 mark in total for America. And to be fair, it's not wrong for them to dismiss this concern given the data made available to them.
All the major search engines hide scientific papers showing harms from mRNA vaccines. Even the scientific journals themselves are prone to the same phenomenon, with the likes of the Lancet et al quickly withdrawing perfectly valid scientific papers on the grounds of receiving pressure from scientists and institutions already committed to the false perfectly safe and effective narrative. The actual data tends to contradict this hypothesis, but by nowhere near the degree that the Right believes.
Here's the thing, it's highly likely that those vaccine death aren't a product of innate flaws in the vaccine, but rather a number of minor factors which worked in concert. First, it was a really, really bad idea to lockdown people against general immunological exposure. The immune system is anti-fragile- it requires constant pressure to maintain healthy equilibrium. Lockdowns were tantamount to telling a professional athlete to continue to eat 4,000 calories a day for several months, before then, through vaccination, telling him to compete in an Iron Man event. And we know that something like this did occur, from the massive spike in RSV hospitalisations in the fall season following the cessation of lockdown measures.
The second factor was production processes. There is great Danish/Dutch paper out there which looks at ADRs in relation to the size of batch runs for vaccines. It shows that almost all of the ADRs were concentrated towards the small batch run end of the graph, with larger batch runs carrying risks an order of magnitude lower than smaller batch runs. What's the betting that green drug manufacturers released vaccines which they believed to be only slightly less efficacious or more likely to provoke a minor ADR, when in actuality they didn't realise that they were releasing vaccines which had a still admittedly very low risk of causing a fatality.
What people forget is that the hysteria probably motivated Public Health Agencies to dismiss rare genuine concerns out of a justifiable feat that hesitancy would cause deaths. The other thing to consider is that at the point that the UK passed the milestone of 150K deaths attributed to Covid, a FOI request showed that of these deaths roughly 17K were from Covid alone. There is of course a second group where Covid represented a tipping point that stole a patients life perhaps five years prematurely, but it is still likely that reporting methods overestimated Covid deaths by a factor of 2.
In all probability vaccination probably saved around 100K per year in America, up until the advent of Omicron for which we had only an epidemiological suspicion that it would occur and no frame of reference for when it would occur. These prevented deaths would have been overwhelmingly in the over 50s category. By contrast, the actuarial data shows that vaccinations probably caused around 10,00 deaths per year, mainly concentrated in the under 45 age category.
I know you will probably disagree with this very rough guesstimate. I do however believe you to be a rational individual more likely to look at reasoned arguments and evidence, as opposed to the hurled invectives and ad hominem attacks typical of most exchanges over Covid as a subject. Look at the data from Dowd. It's difficult to dismiss entirely, even if much of the book is padded with emotive newspaper articles. The data, however, is mostly sound.
FYI- sudden deaths did occur amongst the young pre-Covid. It was an already alarming trend which was growing year on year, mainly because of increases in childhood obesity and diabetes. But long Covid and the bad health habits incurred by lockdowns are simply not sufficient to explain a statistical sevenfold spike in sudden deaths amongst the under 45s which just happened to occur during the months of vaccine rollout.
You're also, of course, completely right about the Great Barrington Declaration. Before the pandemic, the isolation of solely the vulnerable formed the basis of all epidemiological mitigation planning.
"The vaccine took a hypercontagious, fast-mutating virus that killed more people than our Civil War and our WWII effort combined, and turned it into a non-issue that requires no sacrifice on our parts." The covid vaccines had jack-all to do with that. Covid was always going to mutate to become less virulent just like the Spanish flu did, and that would have happened without any vaccines (even ones that work, which the mRNA vaccines do not work and don't stop the spread of the disease).
You are so wrong it would be comical if it weren’t so serious. IRL when I run into someone like you I sadly think ‘too bad. Dead man walking here.’ At some point you will wake up. But likely it will be too late for you and or your dying family member.
"but he never would've gotten the illness had he had the vaccine."
You literally said that after having been vaccinated 5[?] times you were 'as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever'. Are you trying to make sense?
That's cause I was a reasonably healthy kid. I wasn't a cancer patient or a malaria survivor or something. I never had mumps, I never had measles, I never had rubella, I had a fairly manageable case of chicken pocks, and I didn't need my tonsils or appendix removed.
And I wasn't vaccinated five times. I was vaccinated once -- the first shot and the post-month booster -- before getting Covid the first time when a new wave broke out. I got it twice later, and wouldn't get a new shot until last week, but that was motivated by laziness.
I never had measles too, because I was vaccinated against it. Same with rubella and everything else I have been vaccinated against. That is a good indication *that these vaccines actually work*.
You didn't get measles again because the measles virus doesn't mutate that much. Indeed, it mutates so little that even people who had it as children, which pretty much everybody did before the '70s, are unlikely to ever get it again.
For viruses that mutate frequently -- such as coronaviruses like the cold and Covid, or HIV -- traditional vaccines will never be as reliable as mRNA or vector or subunit vaccines. Hence why the Chinese Covid vaccine, which is a traditional vaccine, is notorious for being worthless horsepiss.
We finally have a reliable vaccine against HIV on the horizon, and retard rightoids like you are actively fighting on the side of preventing its dissemination. This is the reason why the Right keeps losing.
I can't quite believe this needs to be said, but the function of medicine is to prevent or cure illness, not to achieve some goal under laboratory conditions. If a given virus mutates sufficiently quickly that it will overcome the protection of a given vaccine within a few months *that means the vaccine doesn't work*. You don't get some get-out-of-jail-free card where you say 'this vaccine would work great if it wasn't for this virus mutating'; the vaccine is supposed to deal with the virus that actually exists. The fact that traditional vaccines are even more ineffective against Covid does not mean that this vaccine is effective.
Now, as too your other points., I haven't read much about the prospects for an HIV vaccine, and it's not important to think about because we already have a 99,999% effective vaccine called 'not being a promiscuous homosexual and/or doing intravenous drugs'. I appreciate your concern that my being in much better health than you, and not taking a vaccine that - by your own admission - offers effectively no protection against severe illness even within a few months is the reason the Right keeps losing. However, personally, I don't think it's possible for the Right to win, and it wouldn't be a good thing if it did.
The right controls about 40 out of 50 States. It would control the Presidency too without cheating. Day to day stuff, the States have more influence on you. Cities are Dem controlled. That is starting to change as their policies destroy one city after another. School boards are now starting to switch over. Your statement that is why the right keeps losing is not reality based.
"And for whatever the merits against mandating them, they're certainly a better unfreedom than the lockdown"
The vast majority of people that oppose vaccine mandates also opposed lockdowns. And the vast majority of people that support vaccine mandates supported lockdowns. The Venn diagram of pro-vaccine mandate, anti-lockdown was very small, completely electorally insignificant, and composed almost entirely of people that while they complained about lockdowns on twitter continued to vote for democratic politicians that imposed lockdowns.
The meaningful divide on COVID was between people that "thought it was a big deal" vs people who "didn't think it was a big deal". Vaccines indeed reduced the risk of COVID by 90%, but if you overestimated the risk of COVID by 10,000% that didn't change your calculus.
Many young healthy liberals considered the chance of being hospitalized for COVID to be 50%, and believed Long Covid would cripple them for life.
Meanwhile, if you considered COVID not a big deal, then 10% of not a big deal is still not a big deal, so no change.
There is an analogy to police shooting of blacks. The actual number of police shootings of unarmed black men is 10-20 a year (many justified anyway). About 50% of liberals believe that the number is over 1,000. Over 20% think 10,000 or more. If you could give these people a vaccine that reduced their estimate of black men killed by the police by 90%, they would still be wildly overshooting. That's what it was like with COVID. The vaccine didn't move the needle on COVID hysteria at all for the vast majority of the left. The only thing that worked was a combination of doing terrible in the Nov 2021 elections (because all those vaccine mandate deniers voted against them) and they all got Omicron anyway that winter and realized it wasn't a big deal.
https://www.policemag.com/patrol/news/15310860/half-of-surveys-very-liberal-respondents-believe-1000-or-more-unarmed-black-men-killed-by-police-in-2019
I'm sorry but what I saw during COVID was extreme cowardice on the part of liberals. Either they became outright COVID scolds, or they complained mildly while trying to bash the right to keep their leftist cred.
Covid isn't remotely like police shootings. We have about a thousand fatal police shootings in the US per year, mostly of armed men. Over a million people died in the first two years of Covid in the US alone. More than we lost in WWII and the Civil War combined. It's like comparing police shootings to deaths in trampoline accidents.
Also, I did have Omicron, after getting vaccinated (for Delta, months prior), and it absolutely was a big deal, even though I'm neither old nor obese. I was as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever. It was worse than any time I've had pneumonia.
"Also, I did have Omicron, after getting vaccinated (for Delta, months prior)"
Bro, your vaccine isn't very good and you should take some vitamin D or something.
Because as sick as I was, I still missed the worst symptoms: I kept my senses of smell and taste, I didn't have chest pain, I didn't have oxygen deprivation so I didn't need an inhaler or nebulizer (which I did need when I had pneumonia), my skin never turned blue, and I suffered no noticeable permanent damage afterwards. I had huge fatigue, an endless and unquenchable thirst, chills, fever, soreness, congestion, and it lasted forever (longer than any time I've had pneumonia), but I was still able to handle it by staying home. Which was good, because it's not like the hospital could do much for me, nor did they need to waste their time with someone who could get better on his own.
Second time, when I wasn't up to date on vaccination, I ended up with all those symptoms again, plus a compromise to my sense of taste. Everything tasted spoiled. But thankfully, it lasted a lot shorter. I also gave it to my whole family, but they were all either up to date with their vaccinations or immunised by having too recent a case, so they all barely had any symptoms. Had it again early this winter, when I also hadn't been up to date on my vaccination, and I wasn't as sick as either the first or second time, but it lasted even longer than the first, so I got an inhaler and a humidifier to help with the linger.
OK, you do realise that you are supposed to be defending the vaccines right? This is literally what I mean when I say these vaccines don't work very well. Though I said it flippantly, it genuinely does sound like your immune system is bad. From one human to another: for a blood test for vitamin D and supplement if necessary, take regular walks, make sure to get exposure to sunlight especially in winter, and try to remove stressful things from your life.
By the way, I am not vaccinated and I think I had Covid twice (don't really know because I never too a test). The first time (probably Delta) was nothing. The second time I took a day off work because my wife said I should. Covid is not an important problem at all.
A bunch of old sick people died. Probably made the country better. Defiantly not worth masking kids. The cost/benefit ratio of COVID policy was awful.
I had Omicron too. It felt like a bad flu, and the disease didn't feel much worse then getting the vaccine (which made me and my wife very sick, everyone seems to gloss over the fact that its the only vaccine I've ever taken that made me extremely ill).
I've often found myself wondering what a national leader of 50 years ago would have said has an aide come to his office and described this new Covid pandemic:
"So, basically, a lot of people who would have 'lived' to 84 requiring constant medical interventions are actually going to die at 82"
"OK, but what's the catch?"
Do you have any idea what it’s like to die from COVID? It’s not like a heart attack where you drop dead. It’s weeks of misery on a ventilator.
More people died from COVID in one year than in 50 years of polio and measles *combined.*
Vaccine reactions vary. I had a day’s hangover. Immune responses also differ. Some people get nearly complete immunity, some get less.
The kicker is that Covid is of the same family of viruses as the common cold. Coronaviruses mutate constantly. We expect to catch colds each year.
This particular coronavirus was more deadly because it was novel, in a similar way that native Americans died in droves from European diseases like the common cold.
Vaccination gives us a base level of protection in general, just as flu vaccines do. The manufacturers target the strains they think most people will encounter.
"I was as sick as I've ever been in my life, and it lasted forever. It was worse than any time I've had pneumonia." And yet it doesn't occur to you that you got this sick BECAUSE of the vaccine? Or that in the least, the vaccine didn't work? I'm unvaccinated, I was exposed to covid for 2 weeks at home, never tested positive, and I have a chronic illness to boot.
See, your vaunted vaccine likely made you sicker with covid because the mRNA makes you TOLERANT to the spike protein, so you won't have a cytokine storm, but you can't kick the virus out properly either.
I just don't get the psychology of people who get this sick after a vaccine and think the vaccine still works. The vaccine is NOT WORKING. If it did work, you wouldn't be getting sick at all!
seems like the vaccine really... did its job?
It quite literally did not work. It didn’t do what they said it would do, an it still doesn’t do what they are saying jt will do.
Never mind the enormous increase in excess death and disability corresponding exactly to the vaccine roll out. You’re quite frankly delusional if you actually believe the mRNA shots “worked incredibly well”. Complete indefensible position.
The vaccine did work incredibly well. It was the most sophisticated fascistic business venture and sociological experiment of our time. Hundreds of governments taking the testimony of bureaucrats who were currently or previously employed by a handful of pharmaceutical companies that their new products, developed in about 6 months, would save the human race from the virus and even prevent everyone who accepted Jesus as their Lo, er, everyone who accepted a vaccination from contracting the virus at all. These governments preceded to mandate this product to over 7 billion people with differing levels of severity depending on the country, from causing uncooperative individuals to lose their jobs to barricading them in their apartments until they relented. Thankfully, millions of elderly people were spared from the virus, but I can’t help but suspect this was not the primary motive here. Based simply on this most basic outline of events, what happened here is one of the most seamless and effective public-private partnerships and fastest transfer of wealth in history. The sovereign scientific decrees of the time continue to be quietly walked back every few months, but the vaccine performed beyond all expectations. The main question is, for whom?
Nailed it
The right wins almost every election. State Governors? More and more every election top to bottom has gone right. Trump beat Joe by a mile. But the election was stolen. Obviously. Almost NO ONE believes in what progressives believe. Men should not compete against women in sports. It doesn’t matter if they change their name to a female name. And dress up. Boys should not have their penises cut off because a psychologist says he will be happier. The border should be closed. And so on. The vast vast majority of people are on the same side. And it isn’t the side of the left. Last, the vaccines are the worst medicines ever foisted on mankind. The fallout will effect mankind for at least three generations. If you keep getting boosted you will die.
"Trump beat Joe by a mile. But the election was stolen."
Fucking LOL.
No wonder smart people don't wanna lump up with retards like you. A guy who couldn't even win the popular vote the first time around against a historically unpopular and unlikable Dem challenger, whose highest-ever approval rating was 49%, who drove off college-educated and suburban voters like no other Rep since Goldwater (who at least had integrity), whose own wife cited rape as the reason for their divorce when adultery was a perfectly viable option, and you think he ever had the majority on his side?
Thank fuck I'm not an office holder. I don't need to win over retards like you. My goal is to win over the people who live on Planet Earth. Perhaps you can join us someday when you get tired of failure.
This is my experience. My conservative friends are significantly smarter than my liberal friends. Not even close.
Your own personal experience is irrelevant when compared with the averages. On average, the Left dominates every high-Q profession, has done so for at least living memory, probably a lot longer (JS Mill called the Tories "the Stupid Party", and he died in 1873), and the Right's response to this has been to pander to the retard flank harder than ever. This holds true in IQ surveys as well.
The only reason things might change is that the Right's pro-stupidity has grown in tandem with the Left's anti-hereditarianism. And militant anti-hereditarianism is incompatible with being a stable, happy home for a cognitive minority, whether on the left or right end of the Bell Curve.
The Party of Stupid mantra is used by righties against RINOS. We don’t play to win. It isn’t because we believe we are stupid.
You --are-- stupid.
By the way, I love how RINO has become the default insult of the retard right when you've rallied around a guy who spent most of his adult life as either a Dem or an Independent, whom primarily won his nomination by jettisoning most of the conservative platform of the last century aside from chauvinism and anti-immigrationism. You Retardlicans could at least pick a somewhat accurate insult.
If you actually tried to appraise the evidence for that statement rather than follow your gut, you'd be in for some surprises
"Bray Wyatt, a celebrity pro-wrestler, died last year primarily because he refused to get the Covid vaccine.*" Where did you get this information? Because it's certainly not available via any search I've done.
It came out shortly after he died. Bray had to cancel his Wrestlemania match with Bobby Lashley because of "a life-threatening illness":
https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/exclusives/bray-wyatt-faced-life-threatening-illness-finally-hopefully-nearing-wwe-return
Which was revealed to be Covid not long after he died by Sean Ross Sapp:
https://deadline.com/2023/08/bray-wyatt-dead-wwe-wrestling-star-was-36-obituary-1235527800/#!
He ultimately died of a heart attack, but may very well have survived that had he worn his damnded heart monitor while he was sleeping like his doctors told him to:
https://www.tmz.com/2023/08/28/wwe-bray-wyatt-not-wearing-heart-defibrillator-time-of-death/
Presumably the reason more attention wasn't drawn to this is because, while tragic, Bray's death was both extraordinarily stupid and exceptionally selfish, neither of which are things grieving friends and families like to bring up about their deceased if it can be avoided.