In 7th or 8th grade, I remember watching a video in health class that included a (presumably fictional) dramatization where a kid died his first time trying marijuana because (unbeknownst to him) it had been laced with crack cocaine. It was difficult to take much of health class seriously after seeing that video.
If your audience doesn't have much background in your subject matter, they're still able to spot lazy arguments. They know they're unable to judge the merits of the rest, but the lazy arguments spoil the whole message. Many times, lazy arguments are less damaging when the audience has the necessary background to evaluate everything being said.
I'm saying maybe there's actually a decent bit of truth in the hokey video. But maybe that's they'd be better off showing DMX than an overdramatized skit.
It does require responsible adults though, but in many countries there were fertile ground for open debate.
Information on vaccine studies? Rushed.
Information on vaccine rollouts from countries that have reached 75-80% of the entire population vaccinated? Faked/not applicable.
Information comparing cases/deaths in US states with neighbouring states having higher vaccination rates? Invalid.
Look, be honest here. There’s more than enough information out there and none of it is being hidden. Hundreds of millions have gotten the shot and the benefits are abundantly clear. For example - “Despite Delta, severe covid-19 is much rarer among vaccinated Britons“ (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/09/18/despite-...).
But this doesn’t make a difference. Despite all this information being available, people will still rely on faulty information like “Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend became impotent after he took the vaccine”. FWIW, the White House treated Minaj like an adult and reached out to have a conversation with her. But she didn’t change her mind.
> treat people like adults
If they were intelligent adults they’d be able to evaluate the data for themselves. Instead they watch YouTube videos telling them to “do their own research” followed by checking out Nicki Minaj’s tweets.
Go ahead. Try having an open debate with Nicki Minaj or Kyrie Irving or any vaccine skeptic with millions of followers. Let me know how that goes.
From the get-go, the messaging should have been: "This is an evolving situation, and we're doing our best to keep up. Right now, our recommendations are X. As we learn, those are going to change."
That's what Japan did. Humility and respect.
It worked.
In the US, it was: "Masks don't work! You're too stupid to even know how to use one properly. Save them for nurses. No, wait, if you don't wear your mask, you're literally killing grandma! We'll arrest your goat-fucking inbred ass if you don't mask up. Trump's vaccine? You'd have to be a colossal moron to take that experimental garbage. Not for me! No, wait, it's Biden's vaccine now? If you don't get the jab, you're Hitler Squared! Don't want it? You're fired!"
How well this worked is left as an exercise for the reader.
Japan's culture is entirely communal. You don't talk on a cellphone on the train because it may inconvenience other passengers. You wear a mask when you're sick so you don't inconvenience others. So much of Japan's culture is rooted in making sure you aren't disrupting the general flow of society.
You can talk about "improper messaging" in the USA, but that rests squarely with President Trump. The entire point of that position is to be the figurehead of America and a unifying presence when things go wrong. He did not, and it caused irreparable damage to the trust and cohesiveness of the public early on in the pandemic.
I can and shall.
> Much of Japan's culture is rooted in making sure you aren't disrupting the general flow of society.
It may surprise you to learn that the US was like this before. And that Japan probably won't be in forty years' time.
You know that movie trope from the 70s and before, where somebody needs a car, gets in one, which is, of course, unlocked, pulls down the visor, and the keys drop into their lap?
That's what it's like where I live.
My town had a home invasion last week. I don't think I've ever heard of that happening here.
> But that rests squarely with President Trump
No.
The establishment burned every ounce of credibility available to burn, succeeded in ousting Trump from office, and is now crying that everything has gone all firey like.
If Trump got a Big Mac on Monday, that was proof he was a Nazi. If he didn't on Tuesday, that was more proof that he was a Nazi.
Biden could nuke Dallas tomorrow and MSNBC would defend him without question. As would probably half the GOP.
The problem with "winning at any cost" is the cost.
Like it or not, that's the state of things in the US.
Those insitiutions could work on earning trust, for example by showing humility and respect, like your parent suggested.
Instead they have chosen to outright lie to the people they have supposed to serve and now its somehow those peoples fault when they trust the institutions even less.
The entire left/right ideas are pretty lame.
Agreed. It's a poor model, and doesn't reflect the current reality.
Moreover, the entire odyssey of you should get this vaccine but only if you're in a very specific age or risk pool and let's punish people and hospitals who violate this set of ever-evolving poorly communicated rules did happen and might be even worse.
After Biden took office, they executed an "about face" so hard that their heads are functional gyroscopes.
Totally agreed on the rest. My stance is simple: get the shot if you're in a high-risk group. Otherwise, your choice, for which you should never be punished.
But in the US, you have people who continue to make arguments about how it's stupid to force them to wear a mask because others are afraid of getting COVID. I saw a really bad meme about that the other day where one person was walking with an umbrella and angrily telling someone else to also use an umbrella so the person with the umbrella wouldn't get wet.
No, and I'm tired of hearing this trope. People are plenty selfish everywhere.
Japan works because Japanese government understands trust. So does China, and for the same reasons.
Along with humility and information, people also need to sense the care.
There is no one clear science, one clear truth to rule them all in this pandemic. This is the only truth I have come to terms with.
I see anti-vaxxers with their straw man arguments as just people who have no trust in the government and the health authorities. Can't blame them though, since the pandemic started almost 2 years ago, there is still a lot we don't know about it's actual origins.
If I die, I cease to exist. So, while from the standpoint of the pre-death me, it is very unfortunate, the post-death me is either a null or an ephemeral entity in a different dimension (depending on which of the belief systems works)
Remaining in the same spatial domain but set back into oblivion by my own choices is about as close to the definition of hell as it can get.
That is where I am right now. My wife is double jabbed and has the worst cough in the world (after a weeks of all of the signs of covid she has tested positive for antibodies) meanwhile I have not even had so much as a sore throat.
I tested positive 15 months ago. Why do I need to be vaccinated?
FWIW I plan on getting the next redesigned booster but for now I see no reason to sign up
You've seen what the virus can do. Why chance it?
I'm sorry to hear about your wife. I hope she gets better.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...
B) you may have missed the last line of my comment
C) trying to understand how this extremely contagious virus managed to not infect me while my wife and I shared bathrooms, beds, and car rides together. My best assumption is that I still carry immunity
Do you think it's impossible that the virus actually did infect you the second time, just asymptomatically?
The moral of this story is that vaxxed or not this virus can still spread, so you can only be safe about yourself. Wear a mask, wash your hands.
Good luck!
There are a lot of things people don't understand, that's why expertise is more valuable than intuition, heuristics, and feels.
> Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a news conference Monday to discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID vaccines — giving individuals who have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community a platform to share their stories ... Among them was Maddie de Garay from Ohio who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial when she was 12. On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds and is now in a wheelchair ... “Why is she not back to normal? She was totally fine before this,” said Stephanie de Garay, Maddie’s mother. She volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial “to help everyone else and they’re not helping here. Before Maddie got her final dose of the vaccine she was healthy, got straight As, had lots of friends and had a life.”
> ... Upon receiving the second shot, Maddie immediately felt pain at the injection site and over the next 24-hours developed severe abdominal and chest pain, de Garay said at the press event. Maddie told her mother it felt like her heart was being ripped out through her neck, and she had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over ... She developed gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, seizures, verbal and motor tics, menstrual cycle issues, lost feeling from the waist down, lost bowel and bladder control and had an nasogastric tube placed because she lost her ability to eat.
> ... Johnson argued that while most people don’t suffer significant side effects following vaccination, he is concerned about “that small minority that are suffering severe symptoms.”
80-min video of June 2021 news conference: https://rumble.com/vj5xbf-senator-ron-johnson-milwaukee-news...
The more we know about the statistical minority who suffer severe adverse reactions, the better we can screen vaccine recipients to avoid unusual but life-altering injuries.
They are only half curious and the result is a half story.
> Analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database can be used to estimate the number of excess deaths caused by the COVID vaccines. A simple analysis shows that it is likely that over 150,000 Americans have been killed by the current COVID vaccines as of Aug 28, 2021 ... I’m offering a $1M academic grant to anyone who can show the analysis is flawed by a factor of 4 or more in either direction and provide a more accurate analysis to the correct number. We’ll have a panel of 3 judges decide if we disagree. Please send me an InMail on LinkedIn if you think you found I was off by a factor of 4 or more. First one to show the “correct” answer gets the $1M research grant.
2021-09-17 testimony to FDA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFph7-6t34M&t=15617s
Kirsch founded the C-19 Early Treatment Fund, https://www.treatearly.org/
More than 2 billion people have gotten a vaccine worldwide.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. VAERS is self-reported and (as this shows) not reliable data.
Honestly I think you're proving the need for this ban on YouTube. You seem to be trying to get it right, but you've been hoodwinked by the misinformation.
It is indeed hard to get it right, and this is killing people.
He provided a 30 page document referencing the analysis of other doctors, explaining the rationale for those estimates. He has further offered $1,000,000 dollars to anyone who can show that the estimate is off by a factor of 4X, i.e. making the task easier for the person challenging his extraordinary claims.
His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?
Because no one who would be interested in disproving it trusts the person offering the bounty to be doing so in good faith.
Credibility? You have to be joking, what does he actually have to lose? According to Wikipedia he had a quarter of a billion dollars 15 years ago! He gets to live by rules you and I don't even know are possible, but suffice it to say that credibility is only ever a problem for the little people. Look at trump, after all.
Sure, Just like Elon and Zuck he'll couch his ego trips as for the people and pursued at great personal cost, but what actual price is failure to him? I'm guessing his true risk is limited to some teasing in the sauna.
I think of that old joke:
>>>>
The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, "Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!"
Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, "Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now."
>>>>>
Surely there is not a $1M bill lying on the ground, ripe for the taking. That's why I'm not bothering to claim it.
1) self-reporting systems are subject to memetic effects. Like people calling in every suspicious thing they see to the cops if they hear the cops are investigating a high-profile murder, adverse effect reporting increases if people hear a rumor a vaccine may cause problems, whether or not anything in their day-to-day has actually changed.
2) The push to vaccinate everyone means a lot more people are candidates for reporting than in an average year. Given no side-effects from the vaccine, we would still expect VAERS reports to go up significantly. And since heart disease is a leading killer in the US, and unlike most vaccines, this vaccine is being given to the older population almost exclusively relative to the median age of most vaccine recipients, we're hard-pressed to distinguish "vaccine-caused heart disease" from "greater amounts of reporting from older patients resulting in more instances of heart disease showing up in the VAERS reports."
2) I think that's valid, we would expect reports to go up. But Kirsch limited his search to ages 20-60, I think to alleviate one of your concerns. We're seeing e.g. 3000x normal, 1900x normal occurrences even when filtering like that. Does that not seem alarming?
The people who call in a bunch of unrelated leads during a murder investigation also aren't uneducated; it's perfectly reasonable, expected human behavior that when people are looking for trouble they find it more than if they aren't expecting any connection. Whether or not the connection is actually causal.
2) insufficient data to know if it should be alarming, because outside of a pandemic circumstance, the 20 to 60 demographic doesn't get very many vaccinations. So you're comparing on other years a population with possibly very different behavior to the general population (for example, one explanation could be that there's correlation between people being healthier and people getting vaccinated on years that aren't pandemic years... Possibly because the kind of person who goes out of their way to get vaccinated when it isn't required for school attendance is the kind of person that cares about their health more than average, is more prompt on upkeeping preventative medicine, has access to the kinds of doctors that catch early signs of heart disease before they evolve into full-blown conditions, etc.).
Edit: this has been unjustly flagged.
To give an absolutely terrible, but perhaps useful, analogy... You're an old sea captain on a sailing vessel without modern weather technology. VAERS is the crewman whose knee acts up about half the time before a bad storm. At best, if he tells you his knee's acting funny, you put your weather eye out... You don't turn around and go back to port.
... and that's the problem. The general populace doesn't know how rigorous medical testing works. And when they get their hands on something that sounds serious (but isn't actually at a scale that causation can be confirmed), or someone with an axe to grind decides to push a counter-narrative that doesn't stand up to scrutiny (but who cares whether it does if the general populace doesn't know how "scrutiny" works and is weighing the evidence of the medical community and the CDC vs. one pathologist in Germany as if their words have equal weight), it becomes a general problem for public health.
One that, apparently, Google has decided it doesn't want to be part of.
We are living in the era of sophisticated micro-targeting of groups via advertising profiles and machine learning. Why are our online narratives degenerating into dualistic debates, as if we can only count to two? We have the technology to perform granular, data-driven risk assessment across a wide range of variables.
At a minimum, we can fund forensic investigations of the reports in VAERS, collecting whatever data is needed to trace the root cause of each injury, removing every report that is not credible. Where necessary, we can identify the need for additional data collection, e.g. baseline testing of high-risk individuals before vaccination, for comparison to post-vaccination tests. Standard scientific analysis.
There are also non-public reporting systems (e.g. HMOs) for vaccine adverse events. That additional data is available to CDC.
It would also likely cost far in excess of $1M to investigate these. It is a clever trick though, because it sounds like a big bounty, while being actually a joke amount (he’s proposing spending far less $10 per person to investigate their medical records or autopsy). And seems possibly in bad-faith too, as he seems to be rejecting the population statistical data that already seem to refute his claims.
Advocating for identification of high-risk groups is another good smoke-screen since he’s saying nothing new, but making it sound like he’s smart and aware. Yes, there are people who need to talk to their doctor about risks, but the overwhelming majority of people aren’t in that group, but are made needlessly worried by such rhetorical tricks.
An actual investigation could only be done by CDC, who have access to non-VAERS reports and other health surveillance infrastructure. A handful of independent autopsies have been done, they are expensive.
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/do-pfizer-vaccines-ki...
Is he referring to being off by 4 or more orders of magnitude?
If I were going to invest effort into a challenge, I would first contact Kirsch and obtain written clarification on terms.
Let us say the vaccine kills one in 100,000, that would be easily dismissed as chance. None of the trials could capture this. Yet, it would make the vaccine worse than the disease for that age group.
Do you see why that sounds implausible?
Secondly, I'm not saying that this has happened, there is no way for me to know. I'm saying that it is possible to identify such cases and still dismiss them. Sudden cardiac death in youth isn't that rare and even hundreds of excess cases could fall under the radar.
I'd also argue that the incentives are such that a dismissal is likely, now that the CDC has recommended the vaccine for children. The CDC used VAERS data in this assessment, which is incomplete to some degree and the window within which a possible side-effect is considered is small (two weeks).
1) the symptoms seem definitely bad, but IMHO not as a life not worth living
2) they usually don't remove the physical ability to commit suicide, so one can "fall back" to the "you are going to die" option (which I would of course, as per point 1, not recommend)
Maybe these stories are put out by the AP? I'm in Lincoln, NE. Omaha is an hour a way. And these exact stories will run in both local papers the exact same day.
Feels... slimy.
Look folks, you can get owned by the libs or you can get owned by the virus. One of them leaves you living to post another day. It's the Trump vaccine, Christ. Remember when the pharma companies delayed announcing the vaccine to not give him the win before the election?
It's perfectly reasonable to have a distaste for this, but I am curious as to if you take issue with this because the person in question is deceased, or if you just take issue with mocking someone under all circumstances.
> the doxxing
I can't say I've seen any of that. Admittedly I only ever see posts from that subreddit when they show up on r/all, so maybe it gets cleaned up on popular posts, but everything I've seen on the subreddit is just directly screenshotted from social media.
> and the general atmosphere of “the vermin are extinguishing themselves and the world is better for it.”
This one is really just a matter of your opinion on trolley problems. For what it's worth I'm pretty sure just about everyone on that subreddit would prefer the individuals in question have a sudden inspiration of critical thought and save their own lives.
That's backed up by the praise for people who post there saying they've changed their opinion.
I'm not going to lie and claim the feeling of schadenfreude isn't a factor, but it's more than that. The other reason that subreddit is happy about anti-vaxxers dying is because it means one less person spreading anti-vax sentiments (actually more since their family may stop too).
However, the subreddit isn't calling for anti-vaxxers to be killed. The deaths of anti-vaxxers who die for reasons other than COVID are not celebrated.
If someone is so hell-bent on dying that they'll ignore every single qualified doctor telling them that they're wrong, we can't really do much about that. But at least it usually stops them from getting other people killed with the same stupidity.
People are blinded by the public figures and institutions that they trust - and yes, that includes us.
They were steered wrong because they trusted the wrong people. You can imagine how fast the sentiment around vaccines would change amongst the professional class if suddenly the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, Democratic politicians, etc. uniformly expressed that vaccines couldn’t be trusted.
Agreed. I never said I submitted anything to the sub or founded it or something. I do find it useful to see what is happening to people. A secondary reason I was there is my parents are anti-vax and comorbid and I was hoping to find something that would break their hypnosis, but it's too deep.
That said, as someone that was previous conservative and my parents are conservative, I can say definitively though that conservatism is a suckers game and it should be obvious to anyone that it's a pack of lies by the cruelest and most selfish people in our society with grifters and the super-rich at the top. Liberalism isn't much better (in some ways worse because they have enough credibility with workers to do real damage sometimes without pushback).
> You can imagine how fast the sentiment around vaccines would change amongst the professional class if suddenly the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, Democratic politicians, etc. uniformly expressed that vaccines couldn’t be trusted.
That reality almost happened. At the presidential debates Harris said that she wouldn't take the vaccine if Trump told her to (which was about whether it was the FDA or Trump pressuring the FDA). If they really leaned into that, we'd be in a different world right now. Like everything these days, it's psychic whiplash how fast things change.
Regarding the "sucker's game" comment I can see where you're coming from but wanted to offer my perspective. I'm only a conservative because I'm anti big government, anti identity politics, and pro individuality. However, we live in a two party system so I have to root for the whole team. Those core issues outweigh all other factors. Sometimes after rooting for the same team for many years you just pick up the banner and wave it.
Have you asked your parents what their core beliefs are and why they're on that team? You might find they're one or two issue voters. Not sure if that would help you find some peace with them.
My mother is a Q-anon type person that became deranged and believes in physically impossible conspiracies. She's jewish and hangs out in alternate youtubes that have videos of burning stars of david next to the Q stuff she's interested in. I think she became disoriented by her economic trajectory in life where she initially was working with a masters and then became a housewife that was unable to reenter the economy. She spent over a decade listening to right-wing talk radio and fell into the youtube zone. and At this point I do not know what will reach her.
My father is a lawyer that rubs shoulders with big real estate people. In his youth he supported Nixon. This lived experience of contact with the morally bankrupt rich capitalists has imo morally damaged him. When I asked him if a poor person should die on the street if they can't pay for healthcare, he assented. He doesn't want to be a bad guy, but outside of his specialty his thinking is not clear or imo firmly grounded. He watches Fox and listens to Tucker. He's a Regan type Republican.
> I'm only a conservative because I'm anti big government, anti identity politics, and pro individuality
I'm a communist because over time I realized that we are being divided against each other by the rich and need social solidarity and democracy to have a high-functioning society. I think freedom comes from having security in food, housing, education and from the creative output of individuals and groups and not from what you're able to buy. In other words, a decent society comes from addressing the needs of the people and cooperation, not from making them compete against each other.
Please stop fearmongering people, if you're under 50 and have no comorbidity, you're not at risk.
On the opposite side, the waiter from the coffee shop where I use to sit and read my newspaper on sunday has got a
EDIT: We should absolutely be taking care of people that got sick, but America has no social solidarity whatsoever. It's disgusting.
The negative impact of fear is being completely dismissed by a large cross-section of the population. Reposting what I posted above:
https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?...
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
Some long COVID symptoms are loss of the ability to regulate heart rate reliably. This causes difficulty even standing up because you need to rebalance your blood pressure! It's not every single person that gets these problems, but the population burden is and is going to be enormous.
One cardiac study I read found that the closer they looked, the more heart damage they found, much of it subclinical. That subclinical damage is going to be important as you age even if you don't notice it right away.
Puntmann, V.O., Carerj, M.L., Wieters, I., Fahim, M., Arendt, C., Hoffmann, J., Shchendrygina, A., Escher, F., Vasa-Nicotera, M., Zeiher, A.M., Vehreschild, M., Nagel, E., 2020. Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). JAMA Cardiol 5, 1265. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557
"To our knowledge, this is the first prospective report on a cohort of unselected patients with a recent COVID-19 infec- tion identified from a local testing center who voluntarily un- derwent evaluation for cardiac involvement with CMR. The results of our study provide important insights into the preva- lence of cardiovascular involvement in the early convales- cent stage. Our findings demonstrate that participants with a relative paucity of preexisting cardiovascular condition and with mostly home-based recovery had frequent cardiac in- flammatory involvement, which was similar to the hospital- ized subgroup with regards to severity and extent. Our obser- vations are concordant with early case reports in hospitalized patients showing a frequent presence of LGE,3,25 diffuse in- flammatory involvement,10,26 and significant rise of tropo- nin T levels.4 Unlike these previous studies, our findings re- veal that significant cardiac involvement occurs independently of the severity of original presentation and persists beyond the period of acute presentation, with no significant trend to- ward reduction of imaging or serological findings during the recovery period. Our findings may provide an indication of po- tentially considerable burden of inflammatory disease in large and growing parts of the population and urgently require con- firmation in a larger cohort. "
Earlier studies of this nature, on young adults, were later debunked by larger studies:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-...
We don't have enough evidence at this point to be claiming long-COVID exists as a significant problem, and such a situation would contradict the very mild effects that COVID manifests in most cases. The evidence in support of it is not rigorous. If this was the breadth and rigor of the evidence being used support the idea that ivermectin is an effective COVID prophylaxis, no one would give the idea a second look.
This is exactly the kind of false information the YouTube ban is about. You're proving how we need it.
0-50 years old (cumulative): 60
50-59 years old : 215
60-69 years old : 712
70-79 years old : 2125
80+ years old : 7389
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1110092/coronavirus-covi...
As we can see, the risk is clearly minimal if you're young, and we're not even controling for comorbidities.
Young people are at risk of getting long covid, for example. https://www.mattbell.us/delta-and-long-covid/
It's worth noting that with delta and unvaccinated younger cogorts, we can see hiw the relative risk of ending up in ICU increases for younger cohorts.
Sweden has good register web page for this. Choose fates after July 2021 to see how the distribution of cases moves to the left, younger cohorts.
https://portal.icuregswe.org/siri/sv/report/corona.alderkon?...
Yeah, sure, I’ll be fine if I get covid. Will my toddler? Will the person at the store who doesn’t have the luxury of working from home? It’s such a big, selfish risk for something that’s so easy to deal with.
Please stop fearmongering people, if you're under 50 and have no comorbidity, you're not at risk.
On the opposite side, the waiter from the coffee shop where I use to sit and read my newspaper on sunday has got a sight impairment since he got vaccinated: he now sees double. His doctor refuses to believe him. Unfortunately, the pro-vax people won't help him get a new job, nor compensate for his financial loss. Deal with it, plebs.
But FWIW, I find that kind of thing to be too propaganda-ish and to push people away. I'd rather have a more boring discussion about the numbers and why we've seen thousands of people dying per day from Covid and the risks just aren't there from the vaccine. To hear some talk, we should just start randomly dying from it, but that obviously hasn't materialized.
I don't deny that either group exists, but I instead tell people that we have to take a step back because there aren't equivalent numbers of each event. There are orders of magnitude more Covid deaths (and injuries) than vaccine injuries. Yes, there are some of each, but as always, the actual numbers matter here.
I don't really find long Covid to be that useful in arguments. I suppose it has its place vs. the "untested" nature of the vaccine, but it's not really "untested" any more than the average flu shot is, and nobody is randomly dying in droves from those. Also it's in many millions of arms, so if there's something horrible that's going to happen due to it, well... where are all the deaths? We'd need to see millions of them to get anywhere close to the impact of Covid.
I’m looking at these stories, wondering why they’re running a story about a guy in NC when local Nebraskans are dying. Why aren’t they covering the local story?
Why is it cross posted across local news outlets.
Just lazy journalism or a concerted message. Feels gross either way. And not pursuasive. At all.
But since it’s a critical subject, the coordinated messaging feels like a propaganda piece.
This is coming from someone who is vaccinated.
> You might be giving too much credit to adults who can't do basic math.
I agree and perhaps this is where most of the difference lies. I do tend to place an outsize trust on adults whether they can do basic math or not, probably from my upbringing in a rather rural setting where the average person may not be able to handle math beyond 4th grade and yet be very "street smart". I don't see them as any inferior as far as decision making is concerned.
Low energy
Headaches
Upset stomach, including diarrhea, constipation, and nausea
Aches, pains, and tense muscles
Chest pain and rapid heartbeat
Insomnia
Frequent colds and infections
Loss of sexual desire and/or ability
Nervousness and shaking, ringing in the ear, cold or sweaty hands and feet
Dry mouth and difficulty swallowing
Clenched jaw and grinding teeth
Sounds like all of the physical symptoms of so-called long-COVID.
There is no compelling evidence that the correlation between these self-reported symptoms, and having a COVID infection months prior, is due damage caused by the COVID infection, and not due to any number of other confounding factors. There have been no rigorous studies, i.e. large, randomized and controlled studies, showing this.
Notice how extreme rigor is demanded for the ivermectin studies but then really just mere correlation is enough to draw scare mongering conclusions about covid.
Also, the theory simply doesn't make sense, given the vast majority of COVID cases are mild, with no evidence of the kind of acute lung damage that can lead to long-term complications affecting breathing. If lung damage from COVID was really that pervasive, we would know about it, both from the acute symptoms, and from imaging scans.
Here is a typical study purportedly showing evidence for long COVID:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/28/covid-37-of-pe...
Anxiety is the most common symptom of long COVID.. All of the symptoms listed could be psychosomatic, due to fear around COVID.
Not to mention the prescribed two week isolation that is part of the standard of care for even an asymptomatic COVID infecion, which could have a profound negative impact on physical and mental health, given what is known about the health risks of isolation.
Not enough attention is paid to the dangers of over-reacting to COVID:
https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?...
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
With regard to vaccines, my personal opinion is that they will prove to pose an extroardinarily low risk of producing a severe adverse effect, orders of magnitude lower than that posed by COVID.
People worry about vaccines not being tested for long term effects but covid is also not tested for long term effects. We can use common sense to deduce long term effects.
What we do know already is that COVID is not a retrovirus, so it doesn't have a genetic impact on cells that outlives the infection. We also know that the infection lasts a few weeks, then is cleared from the body.
Similarly, none of the vaccines change cell DNA, so will not have a genetic impact that outlives the vaccination's immediate post administration effects.
Therefore we can deduce that the only long-term impact of the COVID vaccines, and COVID, is from the damage done during the few days of immune response to the vaccine antigens, and few weeks when the COVID infection is active, respectively, and thus that the severity of the immediate-vaccine-response/infection can be expected to be proportional to the risk of long-term complications (i.e. long-term effects of vaccines, or long-COVID). So any vaccine that poses an extremely low risk of producing a severe immediate adverse effect, or any demographic which faces an extremely low risk of facing serious symptoms and death from COVID, should also face an accordingly low risk of long-term complications.
With vaccines, there is also the risk of 'antibody-dependent enhancement of virus infection', but so far, that hasn't manifested in any of the COVID vaccines.
The same can be said for a majority of cancer symptoms, autoimmune disorders, etc. Handwaving symptoms away as "that could be imagined" doesn't make it so.
Having seen horrific xrays of the lungs of some COVID survivors, I have trouble believing that symptoms like "chest pain" and "abnormal breathing" are psychosomatic for a majority those reporting them.
It’s hard not to marvel at this virus if it wasn’t trying to fsck you up at every turn
Though I'm not fully convinced for needing vaccine if already gone through symptomatic covid. If I have got the real thing training the immune system, what real benefit a controlled training by vaccine would give over that?
Handwaving away the effects of psychological stress also makes no sense. I didn't say they were imagined. I said they were psychosomatic, which means due to psychological stress.
More generally, when all of the long-COVID symptoms could be due to a host of other confounding factors, it makes no sense to blame COVID and make people even more afraid, and thus potentially exacerbate the very symptoms you are sounding the alarm about.
As Bill Maher noted, people, especially Democrats, are already vastly over-estimating the risk posed by COVID. It's not wise to dismiss the potential unintended adverse effects of this misassessment, and focus exclusively on the risk posed by COVID. A one-dimensional focus on COVID risk is a simplistic and imbalanced way of approaching risk management.
>>I have trouble believing that symptoms like "chest pain" and "abnormal breathing" are psychosomatic for a majority those reporting them.
Both are very common results of anxiety. Given there is no indication of widespread heart or lung damage from the vast majority of COVID cases, attributing these to COVID makes no sense.
Also, loneliness, is extremely deadly:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/loneliness-ha...
We have no idea what two weeks of total isolation, which all of these people who are diagnosed with COVID are subjected to, does to people. Incidentally, anxiety and depression - the most commonly reported "long-COVID" symptoms - are one of the most common effects of loneliness:
https://www.medicinenet.com/what_does_loneliness_do_to_a_per...
So you want to conclude that it's COVID doing this to people despite no evidence of widespread heart/lung damage that could explain these responses, and when there are more plausible explanations emanating from psychological stress?
That is incorrect. [0][1][2][3]
[0] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7588618/
[2] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
My statement is not incorrect. Your links show no such thing.
The vast majority of covid cases have very mild acute symptoms, so the vast majority of the reports of chest pains and "abnormal breathing" months after the infection, that are attributed to "long COVID", could not possibly be due to heart or lung damage from COVID. That kind of pervasive damage would show up in the acute symptoms and in imaging scans and we would know about it.
COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.
This is a dangerous message to push. The reality is that there are many lasting consequences of COVID that fall short of death but are, never the less, quite serious. The so called “long COVID” really needs to be part of the vaccine calculus because the health consequences are very much worse than the purported side effects from the vaccine.
I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon first hand when it comes to drugs. As a teenager, there was lots of anti-drug messaging trying to convince us that ecstasy was dangerous. And all of it focused on scaring kids by exaggerating the risk of death. But we could see people taking it regularly and none of them were dying. And so it undercut the message. But decades later, I know a few people who’ve had depressive episodes potentially linked to heavy ecstasy use. And that consequence was never a part of the decision-making process because the authorities discredited themselves by being unnecessarily and obviously hyperbolic.
We need better messaging that provides people with the full range of consequences for their choices. The “you’re going to die!!!” hysteria ends up being counterproductive. Even as deadly as COVID is, the truth is that unvaccinated people probably won’t die from their case…the vast majority survive. But if people understood how many recoveries included long-term health consequences that significantly affected their quality of life, they might be better able to weigh that against the potential side effects of a vaccine.