You're probably referring to Biontech*, but when I got AstraZeneca the chances of dying from the virus for my age interval was only slightly more than the chance of dying from the vaccine, as calculated by the ECDC.

* which as an aside does cause myocarditis and pericardits in particular for young males. This is important because for example in Germany the incidence was 1 case from 17.271 doses for males in the 12-17 age range and in most cases the symptoms appeared after the second dose, which may mean that a booster could also trigger it.

The fact that they completely ignore natural immunity in the USA is enough to be concerned about their motivations.

It's being ignored because it's fraught with problems.

People think they had COVID in the early pre-testing days, but it was just the flu or a bad cold. (My son was in this realm; severe pneumonia in early 2020, but later testing showed no antibodies.) You'd have restaurants swamped with angry "but I've already had it!" people.

Verification is hard; you can't just take word for it, so that means an antibody test, and at that point you might as well have just vaccinated them anyways while they were in.

The US completely botched testing: insisted of creating its own test which didn't work, wouldn't test most people and didn't scale testing capacity. I feel very sorry for those which had COVID and have sequelae and no way to prove they were sick. Sweden did something similar.

Verification isn't hard if you don't completely fuck up. There are countries in Europe which don't have the medical capabilities of the US and they were able to get this right.

You're cherry picking from people who think they had it. There are millions who know they've had COVID like myself, and I still have very high antibodies almost 9 months on. I am fit, do not have a comorbidity like obesity, hypertension, diabetes, etc. Remember, over 78% of all hospitalizations involve obesity and other comorbidities, and disproportionately affect much older people. It should be me and my doctor's choice on whether getting the jab is good for me or not. Censorship doesn't address the nuances of the issue. It leads to disenfranchising people. In addition, the vaccine spikes your antibodies, and if your antibodies are currently high, it can lead to more frequent or serious side effects. The 2018 Spanish Flu caused deaths in the young and healthy by having their immune systems go into an overwhelmingly high gear, but older people's weaker immune systems spared them this consequence. I have natural immunity, I am fit, and my risk of a second, severe infection is equal or less to your vaccinated status. After 9 months the vaccine's efficacy is much lower, and doesn't really work well against the variants. There is no long-term data, obviously, on the vaccine yet, since it was only given to the public less than a year ago. Let's see three to seven years from now. Let's remember Pfizer was the company that in 1996 setup a tent near a Doctors without Borders tent and gave an experimental antibiotic drug to 200 children, maybe more, without their parent's consent, and then 10 or 11 of those children died with others suffering other maladies thought to be from the drug. An illegal, immoral drug trial. They packed up their tent, and later back-dated a letter to say they had gone through ethics channels with the Nigerian government. So yeah, let's squash any anti-vaccine talk, because what's good for you is good for everyone. Personally, I am vaccinated with everything but the COVID vaccinations, so I am not antivax, and shouldn't be discriminated against like that. My older children got the vaccine, but me and my wife and our younger children have not, since we all had COVID, and we all have high antibodies. Fake vaccination cards also defeat your "fraught with problems" argument of people think they had it, but didn't argument. There will always be difficulties in sorting this out. That's no reason to go full-in on censorship.

Going full Gish Gallop kinda proves the point about disinformation here.

Here are but a few sources for some of the statements I made; there are plenty more:

Obesity and COVID hospitalizations: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm

Waning VE of vaccines (many more studies available from the CDC and others too): https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Pfizer medicine and unethical trial on Nigerian children in 1996: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/11/pfizer-nigeria...

I particularly think the Wikileaks that shows more unethical, illegal attempts to get out of it are even more interesting: "But last year a US diplomatic cable uncovered by WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action."

Your son or you "thought" he had it. I had it. A positive COVID test, and antibody tests 8 and 9 months later. Not my imagination.

I recommend the vaccine for friends who have not had COVID, but that is their choice not mine. If I were in my twenties, healthy, and no comorbidities, I wouldn't personally get it. You only need to look at the chart of COVID deaths and hospitalizations by age bracket, and you can see that the risk is very low. Let's see if there are any issues 3 to 5 years from now. Unfortunately, Pfizer vaccinated their control group, so long-term safety studies will have to be restarted or done by others.

People with prior infection should be angry about not being allowed to have the same access as vaccinated people. The US State department accepts it for entry into the US, but a pizzeria owner needs to turn away natural immunity folk? You wonder why there's anger? Japan, Singapore, Norway, the UK, and Ireland are doing away with COVID restrictions, and for the most part, vaccine passports. The US is completely ignoring natural immunity outside of entry to the US. Weird.

> they'd be covered in a second on fox news

I don't know why you assume Fox is anti-vax, Trump took the vaccine and promotes it on Fox News interviews himself.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-urges-all-americans-to-g...

Have you watched Tucker Carlson? I would be pleased if they charged the man with murder after this is all over. Do you think it's odd he won't answer questions about his own vaccination status?

Fox News repeatedly highlighted the dangers of covid:

https://youtu.be/wmoABTiCpco

I dont understand why everyone thinks they are fascists.

The video shows soundbites of commentators saying illegal immigrants, in crowded conditions, potentially have covid.

I don't know if that's correct or not but it has nothing to do with my point that pro-vaccine content does exist on Fox News.

People see the world as us and them. Dem vs Rep. In reality it is those who control and wished to be controlled vs those who wish to remain free.

Fox and CNN are two sides of the same coin.

"almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination" how do you think you'd possibly hear about this when you are replying to an article where any anti-vaccine information is censored?

Well over 2 billion people have been vaccinated. You probably know some of them in real life - you don't need a broadcaster to tell you if there are problems.

You really think "any anti-vaccine information is censored"?

This policy on YouTube just started, and, last I heard anyway, there are other sources of information other than YouTube.

There have obviously been many many sources of information on the internet that allow anti-vaccine information. And, if that information was actually credible, it would have also been available to, for instance, those at YouTube who made this policy. What do you figure their agenda is for covering it up?

Found on a different discussion at TheZvi (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/covid-9-23-there-is-...):

--- start quote #1 ---

Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse.

She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal.

[...]

And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention.

--- end quote #1 ---

and later, in response

--- start quote #2 ---

I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.

--- end quote #2 ---

> I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.

This is a really frustrating perspective to hear.

> I heard this bogus claim about something I don't understand and wanted to know if it was true

> All I could find was doctors saying it was nonsense

> How could I know what the truth was?

I suspect it's a common form of reasoning. It's committing so many mistakes all at once.

* Refusal to acknowledge that you might be considering nonsense and thus perceiving anyone saying it's nonsense as malicious

* Complete refusal or certainty in your inability to do basic research on things that are well documented by many organizations and easy to find BUT STILL SAYING ITS HARD TO FIND

* Not just lack of trust, but certainty of distrust for authority figures. Anything they say has negative value.

It's far more upsetting to me than hearing people with malicious political agendas being assholes.

So you think it's a problem that people want to see an actual explanation, rather than just hearing authority figures say "don't worry your little head, we'll make the decisions for you"?

Every day we hear the mantra, "follow the science!". Here are people striving to do exactly that, and they're being criticized for it. Saying that they're not trying hard enough if they're not finding the answers they seek when it's framed the way you say it must be presented is not a recipe for helping such people overcome their objections.

If you want an actual explanation you can google "do vaccines alter your dna" and find plenty of results that explain it in simple detail for non scientists.

Others simply say "No it does not alter your dna" because that concept is irrelevant and made up. There's no basis for it.

You don't get to say you're unable to get an explanation if you're not getting it because you either refuse to do the most basic search, or do the search and refuse to acknowledge it.

This isn't about who has moral high ground. This is about convincing people to take the damned vaccine. I'd think it's more important to find ways to reach such people, than it is to feel morally righteous about the skeptic being a parasitic moron who isn't researching hard enough.

It's not about moral high ground. It's about lamenting the vast wave of anti-intellectualism that has reached such a disturbingly high level.

You cannot lead an effective society in which people embrace the doublethink of simultaneously refusing to acknowledge experts, refusing to even attempt to understand something themselves, and still demanding an understanding of something.

No. They are not striving to follow the science.

They are striving to find evidence that supports their confirmation bias.

It's like you said: they're not finding the answers they seek (because they are seeking for specific answers).

Maybe you should go back and read what I quoted. In both cases, the people said that they did eventually find what they needed, and decided to do the vaccination.

These two people were complaining not that they couldn't find anti-vax information. They were complaining that they couldn't find anybody directly refuting anti-vax claims, because those anti-vax claims had (assumedly) been censored.

But let's assume that you're correct. Wouldn't it be better to let the skeptic find some posting from a person who wrongly believed that, say, the vaccine causes sterility; and when they go read that (maybe just to bolster their own beliefs) they also see the reply from someone who addresses the skeptic's incorrect beliefs? If we prevent our hypothetical skeptic from finding that page that made him feel safe, he wouldn't have gotten to the counter-argument at all.

> Wouldn't it be better to let the skeptic find some posting from a person who wrongly believed that, say, the vaccine causes sterility; and when they go read that (maybe just to bolster their own beliefs) they also see the reply from someone who addresses the skeptic's incorrect beliefs?

No, because...

"The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." ~ Albert Einstein

    Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? ... Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?

It made it more difficult to ascertain what the risks were, I didn't feel our officials were being honest with us (something I still think). Back in early 2021 it was a lot more open to speculation since it was an minimally tested treatment who's delivery method had never been widely deployed on humans before. We still don't know if there's long term effects and there's no way for us to find out until enough time has passed. I didn't want to be part of the initial test group.

    Since covid is so deadly if you get it

I'm relatively young and not in any risk categories, covid does not pose much of a death risk to me. Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect). I decided that protection from the latter category (significant non-deadly outcomes) was worth my rather nebulous fears that we'll realize it does some harm over the next decade.

    and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore

"Basically almost no" is a difficult term to quantify, but VAERS database does have plenty of entries.

> Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect)

Is there credible, non-censorious evidence that the vaccine reduces these particular risks? This is the same argument that we keep seeing: you have to take this vaccine because ${thing that vaccines normally do but this one hasn't been shown to do}. The most egregious example is "provide immunity"/"improve outcomes for anyone around you". I just don't believe a word of it until I see the science.

I don’t know what level of convincing you need, but here in BC, unvaccinated people are about 25x more likely to show up in a hospital than vaccinated people:

https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0058-001843

Over the past two weeks:

> After factoring for age, people not vaccinated are 25.8 times more likely to be hospitalized than those fully vaccinated.

(The age correction reflects the fact that vaccines aren’t distributed evenly by age).

Sorry, I just don't believe these numbers. Even mainstream media sources have begun admitting that hospital admission rates are meaningless because they reflect mostly test results from hospital admissions for concerns other than covid symptoms. It is interesting that despite this the unvaccinated are showing up more, but because it is for example plausible that the unvaccinated are just plain leaving their homes more, I think that actual scientific study is needed to explain these numbers.

I recognize that it's ridiculous to be in a situation where I'm rejecting facts; that's a great way to be led completely astray. But that's the world that censorship has created.

> I recognize that it's ridiculous to be in a situation where I'm rejecting facts; that's a great way to be led completely astray. But that's the world that censorship has created.

Sounds to me like you're blaming everyone else for something that's completely under your control.

What will you believe?

As I said,

> I think that actual scientific study is needed to explain these numbers.

Science is not done in the media. I'm tired of being told that I have to believe the science that's on TV when every single time I investigate it turns out the science says the exact opposite. The non-scientific "facts" in the media are even worse; take those overwhelmed hospitals in Oklahoma and the nationwide overwhelmed poison control centers, which were both bold-faced lies. (In case you've missed the non-retractions, Oklahoma hospitals denied having ivermectin patients and only 2% of calls to poison control had anything to do with covid.)

You dodged the question of what you actually would believe.

You were linked a government study, then said "science is not done in the media"

The only link I see in this thread is a government press release, not a scientific study. The first step is to be able to distinguish those.

That's not a press release, it's a summary of government data, which they source here:

http://news.gov.bc.ca/files/8-31_PHO_modelling.pdf

And here:

http://www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19...

You still didn't answer the question of what would you actually believe. It seems like you might just call anything you don't like "the media". Let's see where you get your information.

That link isn't from the media.

Did you miss the first (last) component of the address? "news"? It's a press release, which is a step in the wrong direction from the media. I was attempting to steelman the opposing position by upgrading it to media interpretations of press releases.

I believe you’ve made your point that nothing will reasonably sway you. Even if a “scientific” study is performed (and many are certainly in progress - but science is slow!) you can simply latch on to any flaw in the study to reject the results.

Give me a good explanation of how a 25x effect size can be hand waved away. Even if you consider “leaving their homes more”, I have a tough time believing that you’ll be able to come up with an effect size that large on that basis alone.

As an addendum to this, I’ll point out that several jurisdictions dealing with very severe case loads, including Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, have cancelled many elective procedures in favour of putting more COVID patients in their wards. Doesn’t sound like these are “concerns other than COVID symptoms” to me.

Yes, I agree with you. People are so scared by the "scary potential dangers" that aren't happening that they don't take something that reduces their risk of death by massive amounts, 20+x times.

All you "young" people not taking the shot, there are lots of otherwise relatively young people dying every day. Don't die needlessly. Search for stories of people who regretted not taking it on your deathbed. Do you want your mom or dad to live without you?

You're going to make an anecdote-based emotional appeal to an audience whose belief that they're being manipulated has constantly been validated by incompetence, corruption, and censorship?

The VAERS database wouldn’t be what I would use for measures. I mean I saw a guy faint like one minute after getting the shot. Side effect? Nope he even said while he was talking to paramedics he spent the whole day freaking out about side effects and then blacked out. Paramedics said they see this all the time, people are scared. However the technology for the vaccines has been around for a few years now and the vaccines all went through rigorous testing. We don’t know the long term adverse affects of COVID, but with the mechanism of the vaccine plus the insanely high number of people who have received them we should feel even more confident in their safety. I mean I get the hesitancy people have. But honestly a lot of people are making decisions based on emotion to not getting the shot, and I think a lot of it is that reason and facts can’t counter emotion (not saying you in particular just a general observation).

Yikes. Rigorous testing? Yet concerned about long term effects of covid itself? With lack of logic like this no wonder we have leaders exploiting the unvaccinated.

Really devalues the meaning of censorship.

Social media platforms broadcasting your views around the world and moderating some of them was not censorship.

And what exactly is the difference in your mind between "moderating" and "censoring" here? They seem exactly the same to me: both involve some other party deciding what is and is not acceptable to be published.

Censorship is government action.

Private companies that allow you to reach millions of people are offering you the ability to use their service. It's not censorship when they don't allow you to use their service (and until today, they haven't stopped much), it's terms of service.

If I invite you to my house and you eat my dog's food, I have the right to tell you to leave. The movement wouldn't be what it is today without YT, so this censorship stuff is too much.

That libertarian/conservative talking point is often misstated, which intentionally or not becomes a red herring. Their claim isn't (or shouldn't be) that Youtube or Facebook or Twitter, in taking actions like these, aren't engaging in censorship. Their claim is that it's legal and not a violation of free speech (1A in the US), i.e. it's not government censorship, because that only applies when government is taking the actions.

There are several problems with this, outlined in Clarence Thomas's recent concurring opinion in Biden v. Knight. Dominant communications platforms are essentially part of the public square, and two well-established legal principles could come into play to restrict their actions: public accommodations and common carriers.

There's the additional problem that government is influencing how social media companies police content, not only indirectly through fear of retribution, but even directly. One instance that recently got media attention:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/07/15/psaki_wer...

Why do you think censorship must be government action? Is there a definition posted anywhere that says this?

I've long seen it used to refer to, for instance, TV network censors. And every online dictionary I can find allows for entities other than government to be referred to as censoring.

Censorship is not a government action. It is literally filtering content and anyone can. You can censor yourself, a company could censor a band and change lyrics.

They run a platform that practices censorship. It is legal. Trying to say it is okay because they are a private entity doesn't wash and they should be called out. We could even band together and censor them.

No that's just govt. Censorship vs regular censorship. Moderation is the exact same thing they can both do it. Just because it isn't the government doesn't mean they aren't censoring.

Censorship is NOT just government action.

As soon as Congress started pressuring the media giants as to what they are and aren't allowing, accusations of censorship became fair play.