This was a decision by DOCTORS. Meanwhile, I read HN and reddit et al. and what do I see? That AZ and J&J vaccines are totally safe and they ban all other comments for "misinformation". What gives?
You also just have an opinion like everyone else.
When you listen to scientists you will understand it's much more complicated than you are saying.
Take a scientist like Geert Vanden Bossche. He really is a very big name in the world of vaccinations. But he has been warning us that vaccinating everyone during an pandemic of a fast mutating virus is a really bad decision.
Babies are the inexperienced individuals, the others are those who have lived a bit. And they should have different ideas about trust.
Also, here is a previous post from Nov 2020 discussing vaccines being required for employees to. I am sharing hoping others will find the discussions as interesting as I do.
They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness.
Actually, possibly not :( This breaks down into two separate questions:
1. Are they effective at reducing risk of death / serious illness now.
2. Were they so in the past?
To answer these we can't rely on any scientific gold standards despite the importance of the questions, because the trials showed no impact on death or actually the Pfizer trial had more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group (due to extra heart attacks). This was written off as "not statistically significant" (this isn't the right way to use statistical significance as a concept). Then they vaccinated the control group, thus ending the RCT phase of data collection.
The problem was that despite the constant messaging, COVID is virtually never deadly outside of the very elderly or sick, and those people tend not to join drug trials. Thus despite having ~65,000-ish participants there were not enough COVID deaths to detect any impact on this metric. Hospitalization meanwhile and "severe illness" were likewise not trial endpoints. So only noisy observational data is available.
For (1) the data from countries that actually release the raw data shows very mixed results indeed, with deaths being higher amongst the vaccinated cohort for some dosing ranges and age groups, lower for others, and overall there is no clear message from the data that vaccines are reducing deaths.
https://bartram.substack.com/p/update-on-the-failure-of-the-...
"It appears that things have got somewhat worse since last week’s report, with the hospitalisation and death rates in the double vaccinated (not boosted) exceeding that seen in the unvaccinated for all aged over 70, and with a higher death rate in those aged over 60 as well. What’s more, there now appears to be practically no benefit of vaccination with two doses of vaccine for those aged under 60, in terms of the remaining protection against hospitalisation and death."
That's for the UK but similar numbers can be found elsewhere in the rare cases where governments actually release the actual data (normally, they hide the actual numbers). Also, what we actually care about is overall mortality because vaccines can and do kill people, and just changing the cause of death isn't very useful. There too the news is disappointing, with small increases in excess death being correlated with booster rollouts but not the winter Omicron wave:
https://bartram.substack.com/p/increased-deaths-in-england-f...
All this is official UK government data so enough reason to at minimum reserve judgement. Data in the past is unfortunately heavily corrupted by mis-allocation of people to the different status buckets. The methodology they use would calculate a big but transient impact on death and sickness from an injection of water.
No, I grant you. Some of us have seen it. Although, there is a complication (in the anecdotals I can provide, that suffice to falsify a proposed rule) in determining whether bad treatments may have been the killers.
If that «virtually» means "following some statistics", than those statistics must be judged as quite blurry by our experience: they conceal what we have seen.
As for "virtually never", why would you think "never with exceptions" is the definition? "Virtually never" here just means "it happens very rarely relative to the total number of COVID deaths". Isn't that normal use of English? We're not communicating in SAT here.
I agree that the statistics are blurry, but they're mostly blurred in the direction of exaggerating the risks. I'll take your word for it that your acquaintance did indeed die of COVID, but it must be remembered that such classifications were being handed very liberally, especially in the USA where COVID death classifications were being directly incentivized with money.
Not really: it is more a matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals. To attempt giving you the idea, I tried a web search for "Bergamo coffins" - I will not offer a selection, I cannot choose. I picked that because the case of Bergamo got famous, as probably the first one, but more were reported (in Brazil, I remember, etc).
In fact, I was not referring to one acquaintance, but many (very many - though, most of them elderly, and yet as healthy as they get). Let me tell you, from time to time I still get asked by skeptics "yes but what exactly did they die from": well, when they die without their lungs, I hold little doubts. This given, as I wrote, I definitely will not rule out that «bad treatments» may have brought the disease statuses to the collapse. What you saw was "normal, infected, healthy, healthy, healthy, worsening, compromised": it consumed them until sudden collapse, when recovery did not work.
Also: I have seen that many reason as if they were afraid of death and not afraid of damage. Some hold exactly opposite weights. And I have heard often, speaking with my local peers, remarks like "he was an Oak - and now he cannot do three steps without gasping". And this also involved young, sporty people.
So, as I am trying to tell, the risks are there, very real, very possible: it's their framing that is, to the best of my knowledge, still mysterious ("old or sick" goes in the direction but remains gross when applied to experience. It has the statistical ineffectiveness that would have you avoid driving a car and only travel by plane).
With the classifications ("died with" vs "died of") a real mess was made in many countries: but this really confused the image, also concealing, as I am trying to convey, the devastation it did there where it did hit hard.
I could say that the emergency management did not speak SAT.
Bergamo coffins are not a great example to pick because that was an artifact of telling the local undertakers (whom were all quite old) that handling the bodies would be a death sentence, so they refused to do it and as a result coffins piled up.
I'll try to be clearer - though I have myself difficulties in pointing the finger precisely to the point. With «matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals», I meant: sure, you may have an IFR of 0.1% as a raw division, but the questions press on why some have seen an apparent decimation, and many have seen nothing or almost nothing. Is it a perceptive illusion from observing at close distance an Erlang distribution? Or are there factors to be defined that would tell more than "old or sick"? Genetics? Organization? Societal features? Crime rates for Europe tell you very little if the values for the critical parts of Lyon and those of German remote countryside are mixed. I am still wondering what made experiences so different.
But anyway, your (undisputed) post was about the effectiveness of vaccines, and I had you digress after your «virtually never deadly», just wanting to precise that some of us have seen something much less comforting, and would recommend to remain wary of the risks (and some already infected people would say, you may want not to consider death as the risk, but the damages), in case the raw numbers may fascinate into suggestion that one can just relax. It is just a margin note. "Numbers are comforting" // "Yeah well..."
Only over certain vaccines in this case. Vaccines which have not undergone the normal testing but which have been pushed into use and mandated without stringent safety checks.
> They're safe
These vaccines are not proven to be as safe as most other vaccines
> effective
These vaccines have not proven to be as effective as promised
> and protect others
These vaccines do not protect against infection - there are indications that those who received the 'booster' dose have a higher rate of infection compared to those from the same cohorts who did not receive 'boosters' - and as such do not protect others.
> People need to stop being such babies over this
There are several laws which mandate bodily integrity, there are whole protest movements which loudly proclaim 'my body, my choice'. Given the above stated facts of these vaccines not being proven safe, not being nearly as effective as claimed and not protecting others it is a very rational choice to forego vaccination.
> Just get the stupid shot
Go ahead
> A huge problem of the 21st century is that everyone feels like they need to have an opinion
That is what you get in a liberal democracy/constitutional republic, people get to make their own choices. There are several movements which want to do away with these institutions to go/return to some more authoritarian form of control. I do not support those movements and I can only assume that you don't support them either. One person, one vote.
> It's fine to listen to scientists
No, it is not. It is wise to read what 'scientists' - between quotes because the term has taken a beating in the last few decades - produce with a critical [1] eye. Academia can produce the most astounding gobbledygook under the guise of 'science' as was proven (again) by the Grievance studies affair [2,3,4]
> and care about others
Why do you connect 'listen[ing] to scientists' with 'and care for others'? These two are not connected at all.
...
[1] as in 'being critical', not as 'through the lens of critical theory'
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
[3] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...
[4] https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scand...
The poster was (to my reading) not connecting them, it was a pure conjunction of A and B: as in, "be open to trust" [good luck] and also "be open to an act of giving" (the poster must have assumed that those unvaccinated are selfish and did not consider the good effect of their vaccination on the rest of society).
Of course, others have retracted trust on observational basis or have found other ways to avoid damaging others.
(¹So, logically, as you are reasoning, the poster formulated, in a deontic context, "▫¬S ∧ ▫¬E".)
Edit: of course, when I wrote «was not connecting them», I meant "in a non-syntactic relation (causal etc)".
even if they would slow down spread I'm not going to risk my own health with dangerous vaccine against something which ain't dangerous to me (not drinking, not smoking, exercising, having very healthy weight) to help irresponsible people living irresponsible lifestyle as if it wasn't enough my insurance money being wasted on them
Anyway, you are inserting weak ideas into your statements, such as that «ain't dangerous to me». Are you sure? The first exception that comes to mind is that # that acted as a superspreader in the first epicenter in Italy in early 2020 during a marathon.