The core issue isn't with "antivaxxers" but with the continual erosion of trust that created the sentiment in the first place. The foundation of being willing to inject yourself with something that you personally can't verify the effectiveness or safety of is trust. At every level our social institutions: the government, large corporations, and academia, have continually chipped away at the foundations of social trust necessary for these things.
Moderna has no opioid division.
And while Mennonites have a multinational drug problem [1][2], I see no evidence they were “disproportionately” impacted by opioids.
This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, not causation. These folks were never going to get vaccinated.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-28-me-18060...
True. That is a fact I believe
But pull out a bit for a wider view: The establishment that said "trust us" over vaccines was the same establishment that made billions from killing millions by "fueling the current opioid crisis"
Conflating the "establishment" into a false monolith is rhetorically convenient. It's also wrong.
"Purdue Pharma hired Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now Donald Trump’s lawyer, to head off a federal investigation in the mid-2000s into the company’s marketing of the powerful prescription painkiller at the" [1]. (The Sacklers disproportionately donated to the GOP [2]. I see no evidence of them continuing that under MAGA.)
To the extent the people who "kill[ed] millions by 'fueling the current opioid crisis'" had a role in the vaccine debate, it's by hitching up to the anti-vaxers.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/22/rudy-giulian...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/04/purdue-pharma-and-t...
Nonsense
How is a person supposed to tell the fine grained difference between the perpetrators of cruelty?
It is all the establishment. Largely private actors ( doctors, lawyers, school teachers...) backed up with state scantioned violence in the end
Not sure what world you’re living in. But in mine, most people are not committing mass murder.
Why, then, does "the establishment" (by your conflation of these things) sue itself?
"The establishment" is a relative term. It is all those %!! over there.
All those you mention are a part of it, a grinding machine that gobbles up people's lives and destroys them, because rules.
...and blah blah blah
You get all those services if you conform and obey.
E.g: Waiting in pain with a broken arm in hospital, no pain relief (nitros oxide was the appropriate drug) because you look like you might enjoy it
That is my personal experience.
So do not lecture me
People have knee-jerk reaction to arguments like yours: oh so you don't trust the government, but choose to trust random facebook and youtube posts?
Unfortunately this is the exact problem. Governments think they have an infinite amount of trust to spend because "at least it's not random facebook posts."
The moment some people see a single slip up from the latter, they distrust them forever, but you can show study after study debunking autism links, for example, and those same people either disregard the evidence or merely move the goal posts.
In other words: these people are intellectually dishonest. They start with a conclusion and will contort or discard any facts that threaten said conclusion.
They'd never lie and conspire for years and years. That couldn't possibly happen.
However, being as that is merely a to quoque fallacy, I'm rather curious: do you have any examples of said campaigns run by the healthcare/pharma industry? And, more importantly, do you have any evidence such campaigns have anything to do with vaccines?
Note: the Purdue/Sackler campaign surrounding opiods is already well-known, but AFAICT, it has no relationship with vaccines.
Pharmaceutical companies betraying the trust of people has nothing to do with the people not trusting the pharmaceutical companies?
You think the opioid campaign is the only real wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies??
> You think the opioid campaign is the only real wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies??
I'm open to the possibility of there being additional wrongdoing by Purdue or other pharmaceutical companies, perhaps even related to vaccines. However, the fact that one pharmaceutical company engaged in (admittedly pretty egregious) wrongdoing with respect to opioids does not itself prove any wrongdoing regarding vaccines made by itself or other companies. Assuming otherwise is falling victim to a syllogistic fallacy.
Answering my call for evidence of wrongdoing specific to vaccines with such a conspiratorial-minded question suggests you have no such evidence. I implore you to prove me incorrect.
I'm talking about perceived industry wide reputational damage by the public as a cause for distrust.
Who cares about fallacies?
Beliefs triumph over logic. Public perception > truth.
Further reputational damages are not unwarranted. Thalidomide is an old example. There are many more recent ones outside of opioid. You're free to look up actual court cases.
The reproducibility crisis also doesn't really affect vaccine safety data.
People have lower trust in doctors, hospitals and pharma companies because people they do trust (Trump, RFK and the parade of misfits now running US health policy) lie to them to get them to distrust doctors and pharma companies. It’s not some complicated bank shot.
We continually see people online who step outside the line and are torn down by downvotes, comments, etc. And these cultural viewpoints lack all nuance so you are forced to either shove yourself into the box wholly or be ridiculed. Even if you are 90% onboard with the popular viewpoint, you cannot let that questioning 10% show. The end result is a bunch of people wandering around with their secret "bad" thoughts being driven further against whatever populist issue they should be jumping into next.
They don't make opiods.
The "erosion of trust" which you think is a natural reaction is, in fact, a constructed one created by rhetoric which holds science up to unreasonable standards of reliability and then complains about how it can't get everything right.
Its absolutely true that public health authorities didn't get everything right during the pandemic. Its also absolutely true that studies have less epistemological power than people often make them out to have (which is what the replication crisis is really about). But it is a rhetorical angle that the appropriate response to either of those states of affairs is a rejection of science or trust in authority. People should understand the limits of science and put an appropriate amount of credence in it, but the idea that scientific authority should be outright rejected is a cultural movement with very little attachment to reality and one which is astroturfed and exploited, primarily by the political right, to whip up their base.
More broadly speaking, I think its wrong to blame the institutions themselves when elements of the american political system have been working tirelessly to discredit institutions and science for decades. It isn't a spontaneous, natural thing.
But most of the vaccines that are recommended for all preschool children in the US are not recent, long predating the opioid crisis.
The MMR vaccine became recommended in 1971, replacing separate vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella.
Pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus vaccination become recommended in 1914, 1926, and 1938, respectively and were combined into the DTP combo vaccine in the '40s.
Polio vaccination became recommended in 1955.
There is no good reason to be skeptical of any of those or other similar ones I've left off. We've got 60-100+ years of widespread use which has generated a ton of data spanning multiple generations showing they are safe and effective.
Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building.
Before I’m labelled a “maga/trump” talking points peddler - my kids are vaccinated (yes, including the hpv), I haven’t done covid shots more than the one required time. We do flu shots but not picky about it. Kids have had the flu (a & b) and they’ve handled it pretty well.
Same. The way the COVID vaccine was used as a political wedge issue contributed to suspicions. I hope lessons were learned on both sides but I doubt it.
This makes mandates very controversial, especially when combined with the wrongthink suppression/deplatforming of discussions under the guise of 'misinformation' (eg origins of COVID and lab leak hypothesis) that happened on major social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
But as you can assume that COVID is widespread enough that almost everyone will get it at some point, the risk from the vaccine is not larger than that from the infection, likely it is much lower (especially if we include more than myocarditis).
The argument also ignores that PCR viral load is a weak proxy for contagiousness. Ct values vary by swab technique, timing, and test type, and don’t necessarily correlate with live virus or infectious period. Real transmission studies look at secondary attack rates (how often close contacts get infected) which is the gold standard for measuring infectiousness. Kampf doesn’t do that. He just stacks correlational lab data and calls it proof that vaccines don’t reduce transmission. That’s not how epidemiology works.
If you actually read the peer-reviewed literature, the evidence directly contradicts his claim. Madewell et al. (JAMA Netw Open 2022, 5(4): e229317) analyzed dozens of household studies and found vaccination reduced both susceptibility and infectiousness, though less for later variants. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Jung et al. (JAMA Netw Open 2022, 5(5): e2213606) demonstrated that vaccinated people cleared live virus faster and transmitted less frequently. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Maeda et al. (Int J Infect Dis 2023) confirmed vaccinated index cases were significantly less likely to infect household members. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...
And a Spanish cohort study (PMC10975059, 2023) found vaccinated index cases had an adjusted odds ratio of 0.21 for transmitting compared to unvaccinated. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10975059/
So when someone waves around a non-peer-reviewed book chapter that literally says “the relevance remains uncertain” as if it’s the definitive takedown of global vaccine data, they’re not being honest... or they don’t understand what they’re citing. The serious literature is consistent: vaccines shorten infectious periods, lower secondary attack rates, and reduce transmission risk. Kampf’s chapter is opinion dressed up as research, and anyone presenting it as “proof” just revealed they didn’t read past the abstract.
Get out of here with what you think the study says. You didn’t read it, you skimmed a line and built a conspiracy out of it. You’re advertising that you don’t understand the difference between a book chapter and peer-reviewed research.
If you think the vaccine stopped transmission, why did the official guidance change around whether it did or not?
And even if (a big if) it stopped transmission, it was still out of line with the severity of the disease.
I never mentioned a conspiracy. You made that up so you’d have an easier argument to knock down. We were talking about evidence and methodology, and now you’ve pivoted to “government overreach” and “panic.”
Guidance changed because the data changed. That’s what science is supposed to do. New variants, new evidence, new risk assessments. We update, refine, repeat. Calling that “lying” or “overreach” is just admitting you don’t understand how empirical reasoning works.
I personally knew people young and old who died from COVID. The mortality spike wasn’t some abstract statistic. It was families, coworkers, and neighbors. When you downplay that or call the response “panic,” what you’re really saying is you’re fine with more people dying unnecessarily as long as you’re not inconvenienced.
You can keep moving the goalposts if it helps you avoid the obvious, but the facts don’t change. The vaccines worked, the mandates increased uptake, and the alternative was a lot more dead people.
>>I never mentioned a conspiracy.
Well that's awkward.
Yes a very, very few young people died from it (mostly with pre-existing conditions) and a lot of old people died from it.
Although the definitions of "dying from COVID" were so broad and numerous as to be meaningless, and the mortality spike lacks credibility as a result. And how do you calculate the numbers of lives saved? Against modelling? That worked well.
The vaccines worked, but were over-prescribed to people that didn't need them and were at risk from side-effects. The economy cratered, people lost their jobs, babies and toddlers were developmentally delayed due to mask wearing and other students had their education affected by school & university closures.
You could catch the virus standing up in a restaurant, but not if you sat down. You should stay at home and might die, unless you needed to attend a BLM rally, then it was OK. You must keep a distance of 6ft from other people, but 5ft 6" was dangerous. You should wear a mask, even though cloth won't stop the virus and meta-reviews showed they didn't work at the population level. You shouldn't go to work if you have an email job as you might die, but if you have a working class job in a store on the tills you can meet hundreds of people a day with no issues. This science stuff is good.
>>And the alternative was a lot more dead people.
What, like in Sweden? I think we all know for the next pandemic the sensible response will be closer to the Great Barrington Declaration than whatever the fuck it was we thought we were doing before.
On the substance: “definitions of dying from COVID were meaningless” is hand-waving. Excess mortality does not care about coding quirks. Every rich country saw a visible spike in deaths above baseline. And on Sweden, the data is not on your side. Norway and Sweden took opposite approaches in 2020. Norway used strict lockdowns, tight border controls, and intensive outbreak tracking, while Sweden kept society largely open.
The results weren’t subtle. As the Juul paper puts it: “That resulted in 477 COVID-19 deaths (Norway) and 9,737 (Sweden) in 2020, respectively.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38262870/
Holding up the outlier with vastly more dead people as the “sensible” model is quite a choice.
Your laundry list of culture-war anecdotes about restaurants, rallies, 6-foot rules, and cloth masks is not an argument about vaccines or mandates. It’s a vibes reel. Early non-pharmaceutical rules were inconsistent. Inconsistent does not mean "bad". The inconsistency doesn't retroactively erase the evidence that vaccination reduced severe disease, reduced transmission and pressure on hospitals. You keep skipping over the data I cited on secondary attack rates and infectious periods because it collides with your story.
You have also walked back your own claim which I appreciate. You are now saying “the vaccines worked, but were over-prescribed,” which concedes the core point while trying to shift the conversation to every grievance you can think of: models, school closures, toddler masks, the economy. We started with “this chapter proves vaccines do not reduce transmission.” It does not. Peer-reviewed household and cohort data contradict it. Everything you have added since is fog to avoid saying “I was wrong about that.”
>> On the substance: “definitions of dying from COVID were meaningless” is hand-waving. Excess mortality does not care about coding quirks.
This is wrong as well. If I get run over and test positive for COVID, that's not a COVID death. If more people die because of cancer because they couldn't get access to oncology during lockdown, that's an excess death.
>>Your laundry list of culture-war anecdotes about restaurants, rallies, 6-foot rules, and cloth masks is not an argument about vaccines or mandates. It’s a vibes reel.
It's not a vibes reel and they're not culture war items. Nice try trying to make things political. It's an example of policy mistakes made be a panic-ed government, based on rubbish like modelling.
>>You have also walked back your own claim which I appreciate. You are now saying “the vaccines worked, but were over-prescribed,”
The vaccines worked to reduce the severity of illness, not transmission. Possibly some effect on transmission at the start, minimal later on, mandates and making people lose their jobs if they didn't get vaccinated were excessive.
If unvaccinated people seek treatment for Covid, should they get put lower down the priority list than vaccinated people? Otherwise that person's "personal choice" is negatively affecting someone else, right?
Doesn't this assume they were/are never exposed to COVID? It seems unlikely to be the case at this point.
How do you know?
One could easily say that since the risk of myocarditis is much higher after COVID infection than vaccination, that vaccines prevented far more cases of myocarditis than they caused.
It has been affirmed that the risks of the vaccine are less than the risks of the virus. Still, we shouldn’t shout “the vaccines are safe” so loudly that we can’t document and discuss real side effects and relative risks between competing solutions.
We’ve ultimately reached the correct outcome here, removing an inferior product from the market.
[1]: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/coronavirus-vaccine-blood-...
When people say “vaccines are safe” they usually mean “vaccines are generally safe” but when people say “vaccines are not safe” they usually mean “all vaccines are not safe at all times”. Those two are very different opinions and you’re demanding accountability from the side that already willing to display it.
I think general aches and chills were not an issue. But myocarditis and blood clots should be looked at and not brushed under “minuscule”
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
I rarely get sick. I haven't had flu or even a cold in at least 10 years. I don't get flu vaccines because in my estimation I don't need them. By contrast, for something like tetanus vaccines, I do get those periodically as my hobbies expose me to cuts and dirt.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/covid-effe...
If you recall, the initial strains of covid for the elderly had a side effect that could occur with shockingly high probability. That side effect was "dead." The very first vaccines were rushed and given to the elderly to prevent this. There was no "misinformation." The media reported information as it came in.
Understanding of the virus and the vaccines did changes fairly quickly during that time, so I get that it could be confusing for people, but there was no secret effort to mislead anyone, and overall the covid vaccine was one of the biggest successes in our lifetime.
mRNA vaccines open up huge possibilities for a range of illnesses, including cancer. The covid vaccine was developed in record time, and was overall pretty damn effective at preventing the side effect of "dead."
Everything in life has trade offs. Everything.
That is a bald assertion. I do not agree.
Of course it depends what you mean by "they", but medical researchers do look critically at the trade offs
There were failures of communication from fear that nuance would be misunderstood as uncertainty
Also for large sections of the population, many in my community, the state generally and the medical establishment in particular, have no credibility for the sadistic way they have been treated.
Major side effects from typical vaccines run in the 1:100k to 1:1000k range, while COVID vaccine myocarditis alone was somewhere in the 1:10k range for young males, and much higher with proactive testing for such as opposed to the 1:10k figures which relied on data from people showing up at the ER with heart issues.
And obviously speaking of vaccine "OR" COVID is misleading because it turned out that the vaccines didn't stop people from getting COVID - repeatedly, spreading COVID, and even dying of COVID. It, ideally, reduced the probability of severe outcomes, in exchange for a relatively high frequency of side effects, and that was it. But lots of people got really rich off the whole thing, so there's that at least.
Instead so much of the rhetoric was based on complete lies. I think people forget just how completely dishonest "we" were. [1] And why do montages like the one I just linked to get removed from YouTube? It's not fake or fabricated in any way, shape, or fashion. Nor are those comments even taken out of context. It's simply a record of the statements made by public figures and politicians. Apparently that's against YouTube's terms of service.
The federal government lied about masks. Local governments lied about lockdowns. Nobody lied about vaccines.
The folks who can’t be fucked to not get and spread measles weren’t tipped over the edge by the mask lies because they’re the same folks who wouldn’t follow a mask mandate.
Sure they did. Go back and listen to what the media and politicians were saying about the vaccines when they were first released: you won't get COVID, you won't spread COVID. We ended up at "you'll still get COVID and spread COVID, but your symptoms will be lessened".
I'm not anti-vaccine by any means, but the story around COVID vaccines changed...a lot.
You’re making the claim. Show me.
I remember this debate happening online. It was stupid then as it is now. The clinical outcomes were clear as day: reduced hospitalisation. And Jonas Salk’s original polio vaccine was non-sterilising and not only not non-infecting, but actively infecting.
The fact that you are unaware of it means you've got your head-in-the-sand.
"Calling on Americans to get vaccinated against Covid-19, Biden said, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die.”"
Are those facts?
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/politics/fact-check-biden-cnn...
What part of this says “you won't get COVID, you won't spread COVID”?
It's... literally the next paragraph. Right next to the part you quoted.
I see it now. That's misleading. It contains a nugget of truth inasmuch as a vaccinated person has lower odds of a SARS-CoV-2 infection turning into Covid, but it's not a guarantee. (Nothing in immunology is, but that's a punt.)
It should have been couched, it wasn't, and I can see someone seeing that as lying.
That said, if Biden had used more delicate words, do you think these folks would have taken their MMRs? Are people who make stupid decisions for the next decade because Trump lies about everything sympathetic because they couldn't evaluate source authority?
> Right next to the part you quoted
I was quoting the comment I responded to.
Now you are pretending that someone can't go on YouTube and find more lies about the vaccines from the likes of people like Rachel Maddow. People have assembled long clips, it's a meme.
"Nuggets of truth", my lord, pure delusion.
"But but but what about some hypothetical scenario where the president didn't lie?"
We will never know, will we?
These people will lie. Deny. Gaslight. Move goalposts. Ask for sources they have no intention of looking at. Then lie some more.
Imagine claiming, "No one lied about the vaccines" in 2025 and asking for proof when challenged. It's absurd.
An yet, he has a long posting history here; we know he's not oblivious. So what are the incentives to pretend it never happened?
You made the claim: >Nobody lied about vaccines.
I posted a link from a left-leaning source, fact-checking the PRESIDENT literally lying about vaccine efficacy. Then you move on to something else.
Well, that's in there too, but you didn't read, did you?
"You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.”"
I posted one resource, I'm not doing your research for you. The fact that you deny this indicates you are completely brain-rotted. Enjoy.
Someone doubted you. You responded by posting a quote from President Biden: "If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die."
That does not support your earlier claim. There is support for your earlier claim at the site you took the quote from, but the usual convention here is that if you quote a site you quote the part that supports your argument.
When someone asks you a question, and your response is to post some quotes from an article and a link to the article, people assume that the quotes are meant to answer the question. Most won't follow the link unless they either want to make sure you quoted accurately or they want to see if there is more interesting stuff in the article.
It's wrong for a politican to lie. But if someone is confusing the President and CDC, I'm not seeing any bright paths ahead for them.
“In early 2020, Fauci and other public health officials advised against mask use by the general public, citing both doubts about efficacy and a need to preserve limited supplies for healthcare workers” [1]. That second part brings it close to a lie. (There was no need to advise against mask use.)
America fucked up thrice: the mask misinformation in March, talking down the lab-release hypothesis (which would have motivated right-wing nutters into being less selfish), and not regulating local jurisdictions who took specific measures (e.g. no public outdoor gatherings in San Francisco, or vaccine mandates in open-air venues in New York).
Otherwise, we did pretty well. And I’m sceptical someone willing to put their family and community at risk would see things differently if any of the above changed.
[1] https://case.hks.harvard.edu/a-noble-lie-dr-anthony-fauci-an...
Huge stretch to consider this intent to deceive. This is as much of a lie as imposing rations during wartime. And not even that much, since Fauci's statements were suggestions and not mandates. They were basically saying, "We're not yet sure if they work well, but we're looking into it. But for now, supplies are limited, so let's not deprive healthcare workers who actually need them."
No, they could have said that. In fact, they should have said that. Instead what they said was some convoluted statement actually saying something like there was no evidence for masks working (null hypothesis), worded such that most people not skilled in critical reading would interpret it as an indication that masks didn't work.
It was most certainly a black mark on public health officials, along with the various closures of open air venues - parks, beaches, etc. (of course not that these things justify any of the abject denialist craziness of the "other side")
But even in your framing, I think they could have simply not said anything for a few days to the general public while healthcare workers went and scooped up whatever was still floating around in the consumer inventory. Coming clean and saying we think this might help, but the supply is low and they're more important for healthcare workers would have built trust rather than creating another transparent move that undermined it.
I do get they were under significant pressure, especially with the anti-leadership above them causing unnecessary chaos for political gains. I just think if we're doing a postmortem here we should acknowledge that the lying was a mistake.
The bigger fuck up was having an anti-leader in the bully pulpit amplifying outlandish anti-society positions. The usual mainstream conservative right wing opinion would have been something like "wear a mask / stay home / etc to protect yourself and your own family". This would set normative societal behavior, even though some people would do otherwise for their own reasons (with one possible reason being a headstrong individualist desire to exercise freedom). But instead a large group of mainstream people, who would have otherwise been perfectly content following along with the system's recommendations, were basically goaded into denialism as mainstream pop culture. It's hard to look at this and conclude anything other that the occupier of said bully pulpit is either directly a foreign agent sowing division for division's sake, or at the very least demented in a social media bubble managed by foreign agents.
1: Unfortunately, that direction was a series of ridiculous overseas wars, but that's besides the point.
It wasn't, in part, because of how we reacted to 9/11. (Afghanistan was probably fine. But wtf with Iraq.)
That is not known for sure.
Disclaimer for those who missed Rational Debating 101: this does not mean they are connected.
So then how do you deal with other state actors who have whole machineries spreading lies and disinformation on social networks?
This is not a fact, and spreading this misinformation is very concerning.
I wish I had cataloged all of the stuff I read and listened to in 2020. There are things where the references are basically impossible to find. All of it mainstream news sources. There was concern expressed in 2020 that the covid vaccine could trigger resistance to other existing vaccines, and that's exactly what happened.
Also worth name dropping one of the most interesting books I've ever read: _The Pox of Liberty: How the Constitution Left Americans Rich, Free, and Prone to Infection_. Apparently so obscure that Amazon tries to auto correct the search.
I don't think so. Biden pushed the Covid vaccines even harder than Trump did. If Trump had been in the White House I don't think Covid vaccines would have been mandated.
I looked up that article. Nowhere does it indicate that papers like the NYT were opposed to speeding up the development, approval, and distribution of vaccines.
Are you implying that if it were Democrats in the white house we would've had protracted approval?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/opinion/coronavirus-vacci...
==
Vaccines often take 10 years to bring to market. We want a new vaccine as fast as possible, where each month matters.
The fact is that starting from the early stages of development, most vaccines fail. We cannot afford to fail, so we need to plan for success. To do that, we must think and invest as ambitiously as we can — and that means in a Covid vaccine advance market commitment.
Please expand on your claim here.
The Covid vaccines are thought to stave off about half of serious complications from the disease among older people. That is thought to amount to thousands of avoided deaths per year in America.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02644...
The stats for the flu vaccines are about the same, despite their poor coverage.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu-burden/php/data-vis-vac/2023-2024-pr...
Without regard to your private definitions of English words, these are both inarguably "vaccines" and "effective".
Wikipedia [1]: "A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease." One reference for that statement is the CDC's web page on "immunization basics".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine
> you might be imagining the societal consensus around it.
I don't think there's as much of a societal consensus around it now, because, as I said, flu "vaccines" have been around for quite a number of years (they were around for quite a number of years before Covid), and that has changed how people think of the word "vaccine". However, I think the word still has an unconscious connotation of something having a stronger effect than just "well, you have less chance of being hospitalized". See further comments below.
In any case, my point is that I think using the word "vaccine" for the flu and Covid shots is broken. "Vaccine" when I was growing up and got all those shots did mean "thing that prevents you from getting the disease". That was the whole point; that was what everybody talked about when you got shots as a kid so you could go to school, or when you got shots before traveling internationally so you wouldn't catch any of the endemic diseases where you were going.
When we began to encounter diseases for which we could not do that, where the best we could do was to give shots that might make them less severe but didn't keep you from getting the disease, we should have picked a different word instead of muddying the meaning of the word "vaccine".
Doing that would have made it much clearer exactly what governments were trying to do by mandating Covid "vaccines". But governments traded on the unconscious connotations of the word "vaccine" to justify the mandates. Mandating something that doesn't prevent you from getting the disease, doesn't prevent you from spreading it if you have it, but might help in keeping you out of the hospital, makes no sense from a public health perspective. But that's not what people thought was being mandated, because of the word "vaccine".
> "effective"
They might be effective at making the disease less severe. They are not effective at preventing you from getting the disease, or preventing you from spreading it if you have it.
The definition of “vaccine” never secretly changed. It was clarified to include immune responses that reduce severe disease and transmission rather than guarantee sterilizing immunity. That’s immunology, not conspiracy. Every major vaccine like flu, pertussis, rotavirus all have that same property.
mRNA COVID vaccines still saved tens of millions of lives worldwide and sharply cut hospitalization rates, even after variants eroded transmission blocking. Boosters are needed because immunity wanes and variants keep changing, just like flu shots.
So yes: “trust, but verify” is good advice. But the verification process already happened through global trials, regulatory review, and post-marketing data. The people misleading you are the ones pretending scientific self-correction is the same as deceit.
Here is what Google says, “Yes, early in the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci implied that classic "herd immunity" against COVID-19 was a possible and desirable goal that could be achieved through widespread vaccination. He hoped the U.S. could attain this "umbrella of protection" by late spring or early summer of 2021, which would allow society to approach normalcy.”
A noble lie is still a lie.
Fauci’s “herd immunity” comments came before Delta and Omicron turned one virus into a family reunion. Updating that view wasn’t deceit. It was responding to evidence, something the “verify, don’t trust” crowd supposedly likes, except when the verification disagrees with their memes.
If we agree on it....why wouldn't you take it? I got the impression from your post that you generally aren't going to?
Or more simply....who cares what Fauci said? I literally had to look up who that is.
That's not what happened here though. These vaccines never stopped transmission, they suppressed symptoms and people just hoped/assumed they stopped transmission.
In late 2020 this was an open question people were talking about, because in development and safety testing they never even looked at transmission, only symptoms. Pfizer's announcement in particular was very careful to distinguish SARS-CoV-2 from COVID-19, intentionally not saying anything about infection/transmission. So they were being rolled out before we had any answers there. It became clear only a couple months later - well before any major "new variants" - that people were still getting infected at the same rates as before vaccination.
What, never stopped a single case of transmission? That's just not reality.
> well before any major "new variants" people were still getting infected at the same rates as before vaccination.
This too is not reality.
I’ve come to discount the opinion of anyone who earnestly accuses some of being an anti-vaxxer. They have no moral or scientific high ground and obviously do not understand nuance.
Herd immunity matters.
Not just amplifying them, but literally putting some of them in charge of vaccine policy: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-rfk-jr-s-hand-picked...
e.g. this source says 99.7%: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7062568/
It just doesn't really work without the vaccine.
One position asks you to get jabbed with a needle, the other asks you to do nothing. So people are very happy to do nothing if they're not forced to get jabbed.
- effective, widespread vaccine deployment
- the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state
- it all having been overblown from the get-go
My instinct is like 60/30/10, but it would be great to see someone make an actual case based on hard data, of which surely there is plenty.
This "effect" is massively overblown. Covid still attacks the same receptors with are all over the body and still causes damaging inflammation. Grandma getting COVID is still terrifying, just like it's always been terrifying when they get the flu. Meanwhile my mom has permanent heart damage from Covid. Not the early strain either.
The vaccines have been a huge help but more generally, everyone developed some amount of immunity, even people who are anti-vaxxers. It's just around now, and our body's have had to adapt to fighting it off all the time. It's endemic. "There's a second version of virulent seasonal respiratory (but not just that) infection now" isn't exactly a great outcome.
Primarily what happened is we learned better treatment, so it isn't so deadly even when you have it bad. Ventilation is much rarer for example.
Covid hasn't gone away. How can you possibly think that? I know like ten people who seem to catch covid (tested, not just random diseases) multiple times a year now.
Instead a lot of people with strong ideological reasons to believe it's not a big deal insist on ignoring it's everpresent negative effects. Including our current presidential administration.
Are we too dumb to believe some vaccines are life saving miracles and that others may not be necessary? Why is it so all or none?
Especially given things like most European nations not vaccinating against RSV, Hep A or Varicella. Are they all psycho anti-vax nutjobs? It seems much better to go through them one by one, and say: "Measles is universally recommended, has saved countless lives, lets do that one. Covid-19 vaccine for a 6 month old, USA is the only country still recommending it, skip it."
Vaccines in principle are good, not all implementations are equally good.
Vaccines made of inactivated (killed) or attenuated (alive, but defective) pathogens are usually more dangerous. Inactivation may not be effective and a virulent pathogen may survive and attenuated pathogens may pick up virulence factors and become fully functional from a different (related) patogen that happes to infect the patient at the same time. Also, when vaccines are prepared from infected animals, manufacturing accidents may happen, such as contamination with something else infectious.
These types of vaccines were mostly replaced by fully synthetic vaccines.
You may read about the old polio vaccine:
I’ve sort of accepted society will bifurcate into diseased and undiseased branches. As long as the latter don’t have to pay for the former’s stupidity, I’m over it.
(By analogy: “the ‘stupid motorist law’ is a law in the U.S. state of Arizona that states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue” [1].)
I don't think those people stopped being antivax, if anything they feel vindicated.
Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.
Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.
Not only that. If the line is way too far on one side or the other, everyone agrees that it is, and then it's shifted. If the line is approximately at the optimum, some agree it is, and those that disagree are about half convinced that it's too far this way, half it's too far that way.
So, having maximum disagreement is in itself arguably an indicator that you got it approximately right.
I played a small role in this that allowed me to see how these decisions were made. I think we should be honest at this point about how much of the policy was driven by vibes and politics. We had better data than people assume and it had almost no bearing on the decisions that were made.
Multiple governments had high-quality models that suggested a much lower IFR than what was widely reported, and in hindsight were proven correct. The news cycle was captured by people pushing doomsday scenarios and many people decided it was politically inconvenient to contradict that prevailing narrative. There weren't any complex motives, it was cowardice mixed with a bit of opportunism. I got to see this from the inside and I have no doubt that it would happen again, which gives me little confidence in the institutions.
There was an enormous amount of pressure to be seen to be doing something from the top in most countries, which led to a lot of the pointless theater that happened.
It is unfortunate but the poor reputation of public health officials due to COVID is well-deserved.
People are responsible for themselves. Mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it.
People collectively are sufficiently manipulable that society only functions when certain manipulations are forbidden.
This is true even though, as you say, mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it (a lesson I learned as a toddler, from my sister doing the "yes no yes no yes no no yes oops" trick on me).
Public communications is hard at the best of times let alone during a novel pandemic with high uncertainty on correct actions, but it's what the government needs to be good at to function, so them messing communications up is… well, I was going to say "blame worthy", but then I remember that air travel got good by avoiding blame culture, so shall we say "a learning opportunity"?
The more obvious stupidity was around face masks, first by denying they worked at all, and then by acting like coarse weave cloth was as good as N95 or FFP3.
iirc that was the prevailing theory until after the vaccines came out. I don't recall it ever being in the news when it was determined to be airborne. By that time, COVID wasn't even newsworthy.
I'm on team "ball was dropped badly re pandemic policy and communication", though I personally don't extend that to blind distrust in institutions in general. It was a tough (arguably unprecedented) situation in a media landscape primed for misinformation.
Notably, Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was never convinced either. This didn't make her less dangerous. The big difference is the average lethality. If we were talking about Polio, people's paranoia is a lot less important.
If you want to have a good faith version of this conversation, I've seen many people have voiced rational concerns and be shouted down because people simply don't want to hear it.
Primary example - Many parents, including myself, made sure our kids got every single one of their vaccines...but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly.
Fully vaccinated, just took a simple precaution that put our minds at ease.
The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse.
Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do. People just question whether sometimes there can be side effects. The answer to that is obviously yes. There are vaccine courts and people have been awarded lots of money from them. So the next rational question that anyone would ask is..."If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"
It's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy. Some people are predisposed not to respond well to conditions that many of us have no issue with.
That's not a rational basis for disagreeing on the efficacy of vaccines themselves. It is a rational basis to ask about the conditions that can create unintended side effects; we already know they are happening. Denying that is irrational on its own...so why not have the conversation?
Why do you consider this a rational concern/precaution? What evidence lead you to believe the vaccination schedule, which is generally-accepted in the medical community, should be spread out?
I can give you a reason it's likely not rational: babies are protected by their mother's immunity for approximately 6 months after birth. The current vaccination schedule[1] is largely built with this in mind. Delaying vaccines for no other reason than "it's too many too fast" concerns does nothing but increase the chance your child ultimately gets infected with one of the pathogens vaccinated against.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-schedules/child-easyread.ht...
Based on that people are left to speculate as to what influences appear to be probable on their own. One of the simplest correlations to make is of course, the sheer volume of vaccines on the schedule and whether the combined effect is creating any impact.
My wife and I went far beyond that and did speak to a retired OB who shared his own career observations with us. His explanation was that people naturally filter heavy metals, like aluminum, out of their systems but some people do it slower than others. Since aluminum is used in many vaccines, he recommended spreading them out to reduce the stress on the body to filter it out.
He went on to explain that he eventually started testing pregnant mothers and identified that when the high levels were often present in the mother, then many children ended up with the same issue. He started recommending a specific prenatal regiment to the expecting mothers to help correct it. Would even go as far as testing couples who were planning to try to have a baby before they were even pregnant.
Very kind man.
Okay, but why does it matter what morons say? A doctor or immunologist would usually say "Eh, whatever" to this request. Did a doctor call you an anti-vaxxer?
>it's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy.
Guess what! A bunch of doctors 15 years ago were scared of peanut allergies and suggested without evidence "a simple precaution", of "don't give young kids peanuts", and now something like 8 million people have peanut allergies that could have been maybe prevented.
That's what this is all about. "Smart" humans don't exist. Tons of times what we expected is not what science finds. That 15 year advice that lead to millions of peanut allergies was overturned not by random people getting uncomfortable about not understanding things, but by doctors studying the actual question and coming to a conclusion that fit the data.
Is there any data any which way on your belief that a delayed vaccination schedule like that is "Safer"? Safer than what? Safer how? What theory is it done under? But your doctor didn't care. Tons of parents do that. Some researcher will pull those stats someday and say clearly "Eh, it doesn't do anything good or bad" or "it's clearly better/worse" and then we can make an educated decision.
Until then, it is unscientific by definition. Does that make you feel bad? It shouldn't, most of what humans do is unscientific. But that won't make it wrong.
There is zero "safe" things you can do to a human body. Giving someone a sandwich is not safe and in rigorous study would result in a "side effect" list a mile long, and maybe even a death. 1.7 out of 100k deaths are from choking.
>Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do
There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.
>"If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"
And we did that with the Covid vaccine and every vaccine ever made before it and it has always been clear that the vaccine is just as safe as any other. Anti-vaxxers are people who don't understand the statistics of that studying.
The conversation was had, anti-vaxxers don't like the outcome of the conversation.
The doctor did act like it was a hassle and their office now has a sign refusing service to any parents who wish to deviate from the official schedule.
> There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.
Did she ever challenge whether or not vaccines worked to prevent what they were supposed to prevent? Pretty sure she was just talking about total volume.
It's a small step from there to the people who chided -me- because I said I was no longer willing to discuss in good faith with people who argued about "post birth adoptions" (that they knew to be a lie) or adrenachrome farming from babies in pizza parlor basements. That it was my fault for these views propagating for not being willing to "understand" their perspective.
Their perspectives are a lie They know they're a lie. They just don't. fucking. care.
And then they whine about people being "dismissive" of them.
> And in several Demoncrat [sic] states, abortion is legal up until one month post-delivery! That is evil!
What do these morons (the ones who might actually believe what they say) think that looks like? Have birth, go home with your child, a few weeks later you're just not feeling it, and you go back to the hospital and hand over your infant and say "I'd like my post-birth abortion, please?"?!?
There were also scary studies coming out of China (though this was later) showing a single positive guy going for a run in a park infecting loads of people. The dynamics have only changed because people have partial immunity now, but it was like wildfire and it is still going up and down in terms of transmission.
To be honest, I think it's fine there was some over-reaction. Millions of people died. I think it's ok to be slightly uncomfortable for a little bit under such extreme circumstances. To be quite honest, there was an under-reaction. We had an opportunity to shut it down and decided not to follow the science like China did because of American exceptionalism. Now we are living with it forever until there is a better vaccine.
China protected their entire population until a vaccine was made available. This means their death rate was likely a third of ours. Their official statistics paint too rosy a picture (they claim only ~60k died), but a simple back of the napkin calculation 0.1% vaccinated die, 1% unvaccinated die, means they did 10x better than let-it-rip. We did something like 3x better than let-it-rip.
The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.
It was not overblown.
Covid was the #1 killer of cops for a while. It killed enough old people that it is mathematically possible that it caused Trump to lose the election.
Tons of people are permanently disabled.
China was welding doors shut to keep people from leaving their apartments.
At the level the epidemic reached in some area of China that may have been necessary to slow the flood, no different than rationing during famine.
I have some issues with China (corruption, nepotism, pervasive tracking), but this is not really one of them.
It happened more than once.
Uploaded 2022-01-06: Xi’an. Clearly a front door. https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/rxddgp/chin...
Uploaded 2022-05-03: Residents locked inside homes with wires and bolts due to Covid-19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpfKZVTSp3I
Uploaded 2022-05-06: Shanghai https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/ujoj33/in_...
Uploaded 2022-11-30: Unidentified city; worker shown welding a back entrance shut. https://www.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/z8fpzy/...
The Canadian COVID response was basically the nail in the coffin of progressives and their quasi-scientific thought. I was advised of all of the following statements upon being notified by the city that I had been in contact with a confirmed COVID patient:
* You are NOT allowed to leave the bounds of your property, under penalty of a $1000/day fine.
* You MAY however choose to travel to a COVID testing center.
* You MAY NOT take any form of public transit, walking, or cycling, unless you do not have a car.
* If you do not have a car, you MAY walk or cycle to the testing center.
* You MAY NOT walk or cycle around the neighborhood for exercise, under penalty of a $1000/day fine.
All of this while people were out contravening quarantine mandates anyway. Getting haircuts kills grandma - so how come everybody out on the streets was proudly posting pictures of themselves on social media wearing rainbow-colored masks, with perfectly manicured buzz cuts? You know what it actually looks like to observe quarantine and not get a haircut for two years?
Don't try to give me that gaslighting bullshit either where people started to learn to "cut their own hair." Barber's college takes two years. How did everybody magically acquire this skill overnight (spoiler alert: they did not)?
Makes you think - if they can't even muster an internally consistent and scientific, non-contradictory response to a global pandemic, what the fuck else are they lying about? I'm to trust the government's positions on gender in light of this debacle too?
They are all completely aligned with a policy reducing non-essential public exposure, with a tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.
Travelling to a testing center almost certainly puts me within proximity of COVID patients at one point, particularly in the waiting room. Sitting in waiting rooms is how I got the case the city notified me of in the first place.
Cycling and exercise is not only a solitary activity, it is also conducted outdoors where we were told risk of airborne transmission was de minimis. It in fact limits public exposure more than travelling to a public place full of probable COVID patients.
I think if COVID times taught us anything, it's that you can make all the "mandates" you want, but if you don't enforce them, they're just suggestions, and the public will mock and ignore them. It was infuriating watching people ignore stay-at-home, deliberately endangering everyone and prolonging the pandemic, and then laughing it up on social media, consequence-free. Absolutely shameful. But because the mandates were never really enforced, people freely acted like assholes.
Right. Which is why I no longer support the progressive left. They show themselves completely devoid of the moral fiber required to "do the right thing" and co-operate in society without the big stick to beat them down - contrary to what their PR team and signalling would have you believe. Thus, I find myself now drawn to Palantir auth-right styles of governance that are firmly grounded in science, not identity politics and postmodernist "reality is just a narrative, and we can create whatever narrative we want"-style thinking. Literally fucking demonic.
The only way to properly enforce the COVID mandates would have been pervasive surveillance state. Canada should also have been welding people into their homes.
The left does not deserve liberty.
Let me say that again, you (the reader) saw these things with your own eyes, you heard these things with your own ears, not just for a couple days but for more than a year.
You know this is true.
And yet, why would some people choose to ignore that it happened?
To me, this is/was an even greater eye-opener than the disease or the vaccine itself.
You know damn well. Toronto is a city of liars, and I have demonstrated it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Nobody here will be able to refute this statement in good faith - only downvote it.
I don't blame anyone for not trusting the government. Anyone who's read (or lived) history and with a rational mind would scrutinize every single thing coming from them, particularly if their health is involved.
Another thing that doesn't help, but this is almost exclusively a memerican problem, is that people enjoy polarizing these issues to their absolute extremes. Things are either vantablack or HDR-white. And if you happen to be on the other end "you should die or go to prison".
Chill. It's OK to question things.
I happen to have degrees and 15+ yoe doing Bioscience, a couple of those years in virology labs.
Find a better argument, bro. You can still edit your comment or something, lmao.
Yes. The vast majority of them don't work or are more harmful than good. Hence why the need for clinical trials.
The Lancet started it with that stupid Wakefield "study" that it refused to retract for a decade, which launched something that was associated with crystal healing into the mainstream; the destruction of the reputation of the integrity of medical research through bribery of scientists and doctors continued it; and covid lies made it permanent. It's over. Not vaccines, but any trust in medicine. We've gone from trusting the "consensus" far too much, to realizing how the "consensus" is constructed and not trusting anything any more. Just drifting with no moorings.
It's no different than when the US used fake vaccination programs in order to find Osama bin Laden, which led to local vaccination volunteers being murdered, and many people in the Middle East deciding that vaccination was a Western plot. You may not know about this because people in the West don't care when other people die unless it is socially useful for them; don't care unless it affects us and our lifestyles. Even during covid, the US launched a multimillion dollar antivax propaganda program in the Philippines in order to convince people that Sinovax would kill them just to get one up on China. Harris explained in a speech (and she wasn't alone) how she would be wary to take any vaccine from any Trump administration-directed program.
This fanatical chauvinism is only important in the West in order to get one up on other people. To display that you're more supportive of institutions than your stupid, evil populist neighbor. To show that there's nothing that they can do to kill your loyalty, because you understand subtlety. You're pragmatic, you know that the dummies need to be lied to to be herded into the right direction.
But if you're loyal no matter what and avoid talking about public failures when they are most relevant, even beatifying the architects of those failures, who has been herded? Take your vaccines and ask people if they're vaccinated before you let them around your infants. Don't pretend that your lording it over others is out of concern for them, though. It's just snotty, ultra-partisan ego inflation.
Medical science has lost the trust of the Western public because it has become completely overwhelmed by bribery and cronyism just like every other Western institution. Complete recycling of those institutions is the only way to get that trust back, and it's what the institutionalists spend all their time fighting against. Generally this is because they draw their middle-class salaries from these institutions and were active participants in these frauds - at the least dutifully shunning their families, friends and strangers for questioning them.
Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die.