benpiper

A better headline: "Fake vaccines are everywhere"

What makes him think tech companies want "surveillance-resistant systems" (whatever that means)?

People have come to realize a few important things:

- Omicron is comparable to a really bad cold for most people

- The vaccines reduce the risk of death for only a very short time, then the effect wears off, and they have unknown long-term sequelae

- Living like it's 2020 is not sustainable

There's always a balancing act between vaccine safety and efficacy. The smallpox vaccine mimics a natural infection, but it's extremely dangerous because people who get vaccinated can actually spread real smallpox to others for a period of time, so they have to stay isolated.

Pre-Covid coronavirus vaccines tested in animals induced antibody-dependent enhancement and were thus deemed unsafe for human trials. A safe, effective Covid vaccine was always a long shot. Maybe one day we'll get one, but maybe we won't. Thankfully, there are multiple other drugs that are effective at preventing and treating Covid.

One-year sustained cellular and humoral immunities of COVID-19 convalescents http://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab884

The very term "disinformation" is problematic because people use it too loosely. Disinformation is another word for propaganda, or information intended to deceive. The author of the post seems to use it correctly.

But people often use the term as a pejorative for any information that goes against their groupthink, regardless of whether the information is true or false. In the latter case, they're actually using the term "disinformation" as propaganda, ironically. The same is true of the term "fact check," which many of us identified as a red flag for propaganda years ago when it first started appearing.

There used to be a sort of IQ test to use the Internet. If you didn't have the technical skill and knowledge, you couldn't participate. That's all changed. Now using the Internet requires about as much skill as scribbling on the bathroom stall with a sharpie.

This report provides only age-adjusted numbers for vaccine effectiveness, but doesn't provide the model used to arrive at those numbers. If you look at the raw numbers, a different picture emerges:

Chances of not being hospitalized with Covid:

Unvaccinated: 99.9%

Vaccinated: 99.99%

Instead of providing a useful picture, the report compares two tiny numbers from each group and makes it a point to amplify the differences.

Big deal. The Great Barrington Declaration has almost 50k medical professionals and 16k scientists.

Relevant: https://nypost.com/2022/01/11/united-airlines-says-3000-empl...

Is this implying that Elon Musk is Satoshi, or that he just knows him?

As a sidenote, it seems like the YC anti-abuse system could use a second look and possibly some tuning. Apparently a handful of accounts have been serial downvoting anything that even suggests vaccine manufacturing or preparation errors have occurred.

Goog also continues to mislead about all sorts of health related topics.

This reminds me of those "scientists" who asserted—with zero evidence—that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin. Not coincidentally, they all turned out to be associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

I'm more interested in hearing arguments supported by evidence than having blind, lemminglike faith in self-proclaimed experts.

Calling these Covid tests is disingenuous. They're PCR tests for viral fragments. We all know someone who had a positive "Covid test" and never showed any symptoms.

Ever heard of the McCarthy hearings? We went from "everyone we don't like must be a communist" to "everyone who says people cheat at elections is spreading misinformation." This pearl-clutching over "misinformation" is tiresome and pathetic.

I don't know whether it was a bioweapon. But consider that if the goal of a bioweapon is to disrupt your adversaries as much as possible, which is more effective: 1. having it kill almost everyone (including your own people) and then disappear, or 2. having it kill some people, cause fear and panic, and disrupt economies and societies for years on end? If it is a bioweapon, it's been an extremely effective one.

Probably. Not to mention a bad idea.

Only if you think drug recall notices are "antidrug propaganda."