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.
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.