Diversity is the way nature builds robust and balanced ecosystems - AI tools that reinforce ideological homogeneity could be catastrophic, for reasons I consider self-evident.

Returning to the topic at hand, and as a counterpoint to your claims, there are legitimate second and third order effects to consider regarding vaccines and the evolutionary dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. Don't take my word for it - here is peer-reviewed research from the brightest minds and top institutions in the world, raising serious concerns about approaching eradication of the virus purely through mRNA vaccines in their current form [1].

I cannot emphasize enough that the spirit of science is to question assumptions and rigorously prove hypothesis.

[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (April 2021) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

The reasons almost don’t matter. If the leadership doesn’t have at least two plans to deal with this expected situation, then they have failed.

But that's not what we're getting. Instead, we're getting a large number of people who haven't spent ten minutes bothering to learn anything about the science posting obvious bullshit.

How is anyone supposed to get actual science done if nearly all the "questioning" is repetitive worthless lies by people who have absolutely no interest in science at all and are simply screaming obvious lies at the top of their voices?

A question I ask a lot of the vaccine deniers on my Facebook page is, "Can you give a quick explanation in your own words why COVID-19 is so good at getting past the human immune system?"

No one has even tried to answer.

>How is anyone supposed to get actual science done...

One would hope that scientists would not be diverted by questions by people they do not work with or know on Facebook and are able to get actual science done regardless of a minority thinks.

I wonder if it's rational or a good thing to defend scientists by potentially restricting the ignorance of lay people in public places?

I think many would say it's good to avoid Harm and protect lives. It's easy to be irrational to defend rationality.

Edits. Oh, it could be that people are extending "follow the science" and seeing how others are not and thinking this as a kind of lack of faith. Perhaps the idea that actual scientists are being stopped doing science because of no faith in them by small numbers of the public is actually a religious thought. That actual science needs people to believe in it for it to work, and if an other doesn't believe it, they are anethema. That could have explain my feelings about the irrationality of this.

see also: the leaks to project veritas about Facebook's counter vaccine hesitancy program.

ETA: Here's Jezebel's pre election coverage of their statements, when everyone still claimed Trump was lying about the vaccine being close.

>On Sunday, during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Harris was asked whether she would trust a vaccine doled out by the Trump administration before Election Day.

>“I think that we have learned since this pandemic started, but really before that, that there’s very little that we can trust that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth,” Harris said.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/anti-vaxxer-accuses-...

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/10/27/western-states-join-califo...

They [Pfizer] delayed the announcement to three days after the elections. I'm sure those three days were critical in testing and making the vaccine safe for the consumer./s

It was an obvious political move to deny back-then US president Trump a public success as a consequence from him enacting "Operation Warp Speed".[0][1][2]

Also, "Trumpista"? You must feel really clever and enlightened.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2020/nov/20/trump-...

[1] https://outline.com/bH8vBM

[2] https://jewishjournal.com/news/314659/biden-is-backed-by-bot...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed?wprov=sfl...

The US FDA was among the first world-wide to approve (Europe was months later) which in my mind shows that there is not much to an argument that political forces delayed the announcement (and how could the opposition / democrats influence a government institution such as the FDA if the ruling party couldn't? Please no deep state bonkers).

> The vaccines they are pushing now are the very same ones that were developed and tested while Trump was in office.

I would challenge that Trump should receive any political credit for supporting the development of the vaccines, because when the development was happening at Moderna (US) and BionTech (Germany) in spring 2020 Trump was still rejecting SARS-COV-19 as irrelevant. Trump should receive credit for Warpspeed that made sure the production of the developed vaccines is happening and is happening in a way that benefits the American people first (to great frustration to many Europeans).

You can't claim they were just following the rules, because they weren't. They bended and broke whatever rules they saw fit to get the vaccine done, including doing multiple phases simultaneously. If the FDA were following the rules, we still wouldn't have a vaccine available, because they still don't have full FDA approval.

>Trump was still rejecting SARS-COV-19 as irrelevant

Trump was called racist by Congressional D's for wanting to shut down the international travel to prevent the spread in February.

UK MHRA: Dec 2. US FDA: Dec 11. European EMA/EC: Dec 21. Months later? Hyperbole doesn't help your argument.

Still: don't you think the argument holds: US FDA is one of the first to approve is a sign that there can't be much delay.

I think some on the left would refuse it because Trump.

I think some on the right would accept it because Trump.

I think some would still be hesitant because their concerns with the vaccines are not political.

I'm okay with handing Trump a win if it can help save lives and end this pandemic.

July 6 - 46.7% Biden, 35.0% Trump.

This is reported by the way, right?

Those numbers are vaccination rates in red vs. blue counties where the blue counties have higher rates than the red counties.

That interpretation is supported by the way the article is framing the data in the conclusion.

> Although there has been an overall significant slow-down in COVID-19 vaccination rates in the U.S., these findings show a widening divide of communities at risk for COVID-19 along partisan lines. A key component of any effort to boost vaccination rates among Republicans will be...

Your idea wouldn't work. MAGAs hate liberals, and whatever liberals say appears to them like the voices of the grown-ups in the Peanuts cartoons. Maybe they pull out a few phrases to parody.

We've had over a year of near-continuous propaganda from the Republicans. Masks threaten your freedom. COVID is just the flu. No one dies from it, they put it down on every death certificate. Vaccinations kill you, not COVID. Vaccinations spread COVID, that's the new one.

Giving Trump credit for it would change nothing, even if the MAGAs heard it, and they wouldn't.

> which I think he deserves

It astonishes me that after years of watching Trump lie and lie and lie and lie, rambling and incoherent, often contradicting himself from day to day, watched eighteen months of him lying about COVID including that first key year where he did everything he could as President to prevent an effective response to COVID, that people somehow believe that he's secretly a competent administrator who "gets things done".

What Trump "deserves" is to spend the rest of his life in jail. His deliberate mishandling of COVID resulted in hundreds of thousands of needless American deaths: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Operation Warp speed is why, while everyone else is still struggling with supply, everyone the US who wants a vaccine can get a vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed

Unsurprisingly, the Biden administration did the exact opposite of what I suggested. Further entrenching COVID as a partisan issue.

> In January 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that the program was expected to undergo a restructure and renaming under the Biden administration. Also in January 2021, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, former Operation Warp Speed lead, was told not to use the name Operation Warp Speed anymore.

So maybe the real mistake was making it free. IF a company could make a few bucks for every vaccine administered, we would have seen the ad industry being its full might to bear to harvest as many people getting it as possible.

I would agree that stupid is winning, but I probably agree more with Kant on what Enlightenment means.

There is an argument they weren’t as effective as they could have been. Is that what you mean?

Calling someone stupid just because they do not share your blind trust in a bunch of people is kind of malicious.

Here's an interesting read from 2010 about how they were having former execs put in power in Canada. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2875889/

But I guess I'm the stupid one.

ok, lets educate. And before educating others lets educate ourselves.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/30/cdc-study-shows-74percent-of...

"About three-fourths of people infected in a Massachusetts Covid-19 outbreak were fully vaccinated, according to new data published Friday by the CDC.

The new data, published in the U.S. agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also found that fully vaccinated people who get infected carry as much of the virus in their nose as unvaccinated people. "

And another point related to education. Couple days ago a White House official stated :"We're dealing with an evolving virus. There is no precedent, and there is no playbook". Note, it isn't the White House of the previous buffoon, it is supposedly educated current White House. No wonder that being led by the people like this the current pandemic response isn't that much better than the ones of the previous centuries.

https://www.masslive.com/capecod/2021/07/how-provincetown-ac...

Despite virtually everyone in the town being vaccinated, 25% of the cases in the outbreak were in the remaining handful of unvaccinated people! As more areas reach close to 100% vaccination, we will start to see weird quirks of statistics like this more often, but if your takeaway here is that it's really easy for vaccinated people to catch and spread COVID, you're very wrong. Breakthrough infections are prevented by vaccines like Pfizer with about 99% efficacy, and without a breakthrough infection there is no transmission. If pretty much everyone were vaccinated, the odds of transmission would go to zero very rapidly.

Even if all of Provincetown residents were vaccinated that would not imply that anywhere near the majority of the people currently in Provincetown were vaccinated. I'm not sure how we can usefully estimate the vaccination rate of the people who have been in Provincetown recently. Google says the vaccination rate for Massachusetts is about 72%. That seems really worrying to me because if that vaccination rate describes the people in Provincetown then the infection rate implies that the vaccine is offering no real protection - i.e. 75% of population vaccinated and 75% of infected were vaccinated.

i don't think it was neglected, as it is more like obvious thing wasn't explicitly stated - as vaccine obviously not increasing infection chances, 3/4 of infected being vaccinated means that vaccination rate >= 3/4, and that pretty much means "essentially the whole town is vaccinated"

First, you are missing that this is a Delta out-break. Delta has been found to be able to evade the vaccines more than other variants. This is something new and something we didn't know just 2-3 months ago.

Next, without stating how many percent of the population where vaccinated in MA what does three-fourths imply?

Governments world-wide are struggling with how to respond to Delta. Because it is more contagious and even for vaccinated people there is a risk of hospitalizations, there is a struggle what to do. Lift all restrictions (as England has done)? Stay rather strict (as in France/Germany where there are still public mask mandates)?

The reality is that there is no playbook.

of course. Posting CDC data and WH quotes. While somehow nobody mentioned trolling wrt. GGP calling opponents "stupid" and "anti-intellectuals" without any data to back his position. Not surprising. Just a typical for these days debate with the "intellectuals".

>This is something new and something we didn't know just 2-3 months ago.

You are repeating the politicians' talking point what i was talking about . The very high chances that the "improved" 2.0 version would come were obvious pretty much from the start for anybody who paid even slightest attention to the precedents. Yet politicians have as always been playing ideologically charged short game all along right into populace ignorance while completely disregarding the long game.

> of course. Posting CDC data and WH quotes.

And ignoring almost everything that was replied to you.

> The very high chances that the "better" version would come were obvious pretty much from the start

I haven't heard that this would be obvious. Could you share what you consider that long game to be?

lets that sink. Especially considering that according to the above mentioned CDC data infected vaccinated people spread virus as infected unvaccinated.

>It reduces the effects so you're less likely to need hospitalization.

So, as current vaccines don't stop infection and spread, why would the most of the population whose risk of hospitalization is very low need (and even forced) to vaccinate?

Good point.