Wow you've really convinced me bud you definitely sound nuanced and educated, now I know that the vaccine = good and supported by smart people and ivermectin = bad and supported by dumb people, I know exactly which side I want to be on.

The antivaxxers are all out in force pushing ivermectin, which is not well supported by evidence.

I didn't say anyone was dumb, but people have been fighting against vaccines and pushing snake oil for the entire history of vaccines.

You heard it hear first: Ivermectin people have been pushing snake oil (nothing specific, just general snake oil.. like Ivermectin!) for 1000 years.

Should I ask him for a source?

There have been people pushing snake oil instead of vaccines for the entire history of vaccines.

You can draw a straight line through the history of vaccination and find people pushing fake cures and drugs that are basically unsupported by solid evidence instead of vaccines.

Curing serious disease? That’s rich.

What do you mean?

Smallpox is extinct, diptheria, pertussus and polio are nearly extinct, and measles mumps and rubella would be nearly extinct if not for pockets of antivaxers creating a constant stream of outbreaks.

Go look up how many diseases these people killed prior to the vaccines, and then a few years after. You are absolutely taking for granted what we've accomplished through the use of vaccines.

While agreeing with your general premise: pertussis is most definitely not extinct, unfortunately. We see recurrent waves of it in California about every five years. The problem is in adults (who haven't had a booster in ages) it's frequently mistaken for a bad cold, but it can kill young children.

Also, because of their sheer ability to spread, MMR diseases can be big problems outside of the United States, though they are usually restricted to small pockets in the USA for exactly the reasons you mention. This is why we have to pay attention to community levels of vaccination, not just state or county-level. All outbreaks start local.

I agree but those were scientists from the past that practiced real science. Meaning they accepted counter arguments and evidence; not just dictate. They also discovered through the scientific method that you can not vaccinate for corona viruses

They also were acutely aware you should never mass vaccinate during a pandemic.

They were correct and that is why you see the results in Israel, Singapore, England, and now the US, that you are seeing. That these are bad therapeutics at best. They could end up being worse.

The scientist and doctors who accomplished what you enumerated are indeed out there, but their voices are being suppressed by bureaucrats that now represent crony corrupt science; like fauci.

Oh yes, the scientists of the unspecified date in the past when everything was perfect and there were no politics and no one was ever subverting science to tell us to smoke cigarettes.

You are living in a fantasy. Science and economics have always been messy, and despite that advances in medical science are now and always have been the best and only real line of defense against disease.

The Israel data shows excellent effectiveness of vaccines. For every age group it shows that the chances of severe COVID are greatly lower in the vaccinated than they are in the unvaccinated.

If you just look at the totals for their whole population it may not look that way because you run into a Simpson's paradox situation. That's because older people are both more likely in general to have their COVID cases be severe, and older people in Israel or more likely to be vaccinated.

To illustrate, imagine a population that has 2000 young people and 2000 old people, and both groups are 50% vaccinated with a vaccine that reduces your chances of severe disease by 90%, and image we are dealing with a disease that is 20x as likely to be severe in old people than it is in young people. Let's say that 1% of young, unvaccinated people get severe disease.

Here are the number of severe cases we'd expect in that population.

    1 in the 1000 young vaccinated people
   10 in the 1000 young unvaccinated people
   20 in the 1000 old vaccinated people
  200 in the 1000 old unvaccinated people

If we look at the overall numbers we get 21 severe cases in vaccinated people and 210 severe cases in unvaccinated people.

9.1% of severe cases would be in vaccinated people.

Now consider a population with 2000 young people and 2000 old people, with the same vaccines that reduces your chances of severe disease by 90% and where the diseases is 20x as likely to be severe in old people, but in this population 90% of the old people are vaccinated but the young are still only 50% vaccinated.

Here are the number of severe cases we'd expect in that population.

    1 in the 1000 young vaccinated people
   10 in the 1000 young unvaccinated people
   36 in the 1800 old vaccinated people
   40 in the  200 old unvaccinated people

Now for the overall population we get 37 severe cases in vaccinated people and 50 severe cases in unvaccinated people.

42.6% of cases would be in vaccinated people.

If the young people also get vaccinated at the same 90% rate as the old people, here are the numbers for severe cases.

   1.8 in the 1800 young vaccinated people
   2   in the  200 young unvaccinated people
  36   in the 1800 old vaccinated people
  40   in the  200 old vaccinated people

That gives for the overall population 37.8 severe cases in vaccinated people and 42 in unvaccinated people.

47.4% of cases would be in vaccinated people.

If no one was vaccinated, the numbers would be

   20 in the 2000 unvaccinated young people
  400 in the 2000 unvaccinated old people

for a total of 420 severe cases. 0% would be in vaccinated people.

If everyone was vaccinated, the numbers would be

    2 in the 2000 vaccinated young people
   40 in the 2000 vaccinated old people

for a total of 42 severe cases. 100% of cases would be in vaccinated people.

It is useful to look at the severe case totals in our population of 2000 young people and 2000 old people.

  420   severe cases when no one is vaccinated
  231   severe cases when 50% of both young and old are vaccinated
   87   severe cases when 50% of young and 90% of old are vaccinated
   79.8 severe cases when 90% of both young and old are vaccinated
   42   severe cases when everyone is vaccinated

He's talking about transmission, you are talking about reduction of symptoms.

The vaccines don't prevent transmission. Now follow that to its logical conclusion: "we forcefully vaccinated everyone on Earth, why are we still having outbreaks?" Because... Well, you get it

After you sit down and mull over this concept for a while, vaccine mandates make absolutely no sense. Vaccine passports make absolutely no sense. Unless your goal is a slight reduction in ICU patients, forcing people to get it is a straight up violation of human rights.

"Pandemic of the unvaccinated" yeah, right. Blame the leaky vaccine, not the people who already have natural immunity.

Reducing the odds of getting covid does reduce transmission. That is what the vaccine does.

All you have to do to stop the spread of a virus is lower R below 1. The vaccine would do that if we vaccinated everyone.

> The vaccines don't prevent transmission.

People vaccinated who get infected tend to have cases that do not last as long as they do in unvaccinated people, which reduces the number of people they spread it do.

I haven't heard of a shorter duration with vaccination. Could you please post the source for this?

Thank you. Exactly.

I have cystic fibrosis. They basically discovered the cure a few years ago. It is called trikafta.

What you are saying is ridiculous. The medical industrial complex has problems, but it does deliver very real miracles to millions of people every year.