doses
Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]
- Thread starter RDGoodla
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Perhaps, if the anti-vaxxers didn't resort to deliberate misinterpretation or misrepresentation of the official data to try and claim harms, they might have gained more of a toe hold in the debate. Unfortunately, the most prominent figures in media spouting this stuff are little more than grifters or have links to the backers of the GBD and the like. Quite. Remarkable crossover between them and climate change deniers as well, it must be said. It's almost as though there were shadowy right-wing groups funding these people...
(Note, this doesn't mean that there aren't some real cases of harm caused to individuals via the vaccines. It's just the case that these are pretty much ignored by said grifters who aren't interested in what the data actually shows, which is that the risk of complications following infection by Covid is enormously higher than from anything which might have happened from the vaccines. This is true even in the lower-risk groups).
(Note, this doesn't mean that there aren't some real cases of harm caused to individuals via the vaccines. It's just the case that these are pretty much ignored by said grifters who aren't interested in what the data actually shows, which is that the risk of complications following infection by Covid is enormously higher than from anything which might have happened from the vaccines. This is true even in the lower-risk groups).
The misrepresentations / misinterpretations have occured from all sides. It's just that there were no consequences for those on the "correct" side .. Handwaving every instance of that as "deliberate" is well, hand-wavey. You can't possibly know that.
Further, lumping people you choose into groups as "anti-vaxers" ( and then you deliriously go further to make them climate deniers too) is wrong and is an example of the bad faith ridicule I was mentioning.
So I'm not sure why you wrote what you wrote, seems you were just discussing the people claiming one or another, instead of the subject
No, the misrepresentations/misinterpretations have occurred overwhelmingly on the side of the anti-vaxxers. Have they always been deliberate? Perhaps not, but that goes with the misinterpretation side of things. Have some of them been deliberate? Well, yes, of course.
As an example of this, here in the UK, the 'HART Group' is an influential group of 'medical professionals' (the training of most of them has little relevance to their outlandish claims). The have gained quite a bit of traction among right-wing politicians and news sources and we still have MPs regurtitating their misinformation in Parliament (MPs can say any nonsense they like in Parliament without comeback). However, the group's chat logs have been leaked:
The HART Files: Inside the Group Trying to Smuggle Anti-Vaccine Myths into Westminster
Leaked chat logs reveal that HART, a group of lockdown-skeptic activists and health professionals, coordinated efforts to spread disinformation and lobby MPs, aiming to 'wrestle control back from SAGE.'
Just read through the article and the twitter thread and be amazed by just how batshit-crazy some of these people apparently are - discussing ways to promote disinformation about the vaccines, masking and other anti-Covid measures. The chat logs show that there are many more contributors than claimed on their web site - there is even added input from one of the people behind Cambridge Analytica as to promote their disinformation. One or two comments in the logs about having sympathetic contacts in the JCVI which perhaps helps to explain why we're practically the only country in the developed world which has greatly restricted vaccine access for children and why any access has seen a huge dragging of feet. HART have worked in close conjuction with other lobbying groups such as "UsForThem" which also peddles this stuff and has a high amount of traction with certain politicians.
HART claim they have only raised a tiny level of funds to pay for all this stuff. I'll be charitable and say that I don't believe them.
As for the funding links with climate-change deniers, it's all well-known, isn't it? You've got the AIER which claims climate change is nothing to worry about setting up the GBD which made claims about Covid which were obviously incorrect yet are still being pushed as misinformation by the signatories - Gupta, Kuldorff, Heneghan, etc etc.
Show me some solid evidence backed by data which indicates that the risks from vaccines exceed the risks from infection, and I'll perhaps change my viewpoint. Good luck in finding any - not because it has been 'surpressed'. It doesn't exist.
digitalwanderer
Legend
That's just sick. I'm hoping that kid is ok, but if you can't figure out that the hit caused the damage you gotta be mentally malfunctioning.When an NFL player had a cardiac arrest and collapsed on the field on Monday, MAGA ghouls tweeted that it was due to covid vaccines.
Just because you can highlight the world overwhelmingly doesn't mean you're right. For instance, the whole false narative about vaccines being pushed as actually protecting from infection, misleadingly qoting the relative risk reduction numbers as "efficiency" drove the bulk of the western vaccination policy. Just one misinformation, with massive implications.
Then another one would be not integrating at all the naturally aquired immunity as part of the vaccination program
The "some"/"all" logical gymnastics you are attempting afterwards have no value on the argumet: some where deliberate , some were not. So it's a matter of finding out in each case wheter it is or not
Again, lumping everyone you'd like as anti vaxxers is intelectually dishonest. Stop doing it! Are there some crazy people out ther claiming crazy things about vaccines? Of course there are!
But what you're doing is putting whom ever you please under anti vaxx label.
If you get to have this label applied, you are automatically on the losing side, and you first have to respond to the implicit accusations. Then, only if you succeed, you get to be considered a normal human back.Is this somehow unclear? How?
Let's assume the absurd scenario that everyone except one single honest scientist believes that say getting the vaccine will make you sick when you are near 5G towers. And say that the scientist has many friends among those tower fearing people. But the scientist discovers a rare side effect of the vaccine, writes a paper about it, and doesn't get the optional vaccine because, in his informed guess, they'd risk the effect they discovered.
Hunting, grouping, labeling climate deniers & anti-vaxxers is purely a missdirection. Even if all but one were clowns, we'd still be interested in reading that scientist's article and try to understand how to use it to advance the science further.
So it matters not one iotta from whom (observing the standard academic practices still of course) the information comes. Or , would you rather prefer the scientist write public appologies first, for not getting the vaccine? Perhaps they should also give up their friendships ? And only after those are acceptable, we'd begin to consider their work?
Rather, my profund hope is that we are actually only are concerned with finding how to use, accept, reject a given piece of data, study, theory, paper for the advancement of state of art. And all these labels were a silly little game we've finally have grown out of playing
I am literally shocked that I have to spell this point out, in fact i was shocked about it already in my previus post. There must be some disconnect here between us which is not apparent to me.
Why should I? This is a strawman, have I claimed anywhere that risks from vaccines exceed the risks from infection?
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No, but you posted there has been "Massive censoring on the subject and uni-dimensional dissemination on the subject from the official sources". This isn't the case so I simply assumed you were casting doubt on the data - i.e. leaning towards the 'anti' everything crowd, which doesn't have the data to back it up. I apologise if I misunderstood your argument. There has been minor censoring of disinformation about Covid on twitter and other social media platforms, but this has come in lockstep with the unscientific crap promulgated by Trump in the US, senior politicians in the UK, the entirely different approach of Sweden led by Tegnell (who has promoted disinformation himself). Not to mention that the dominant right-wing media in countries such as the US and UK has been pushing doubts about the official approach from the very start of the pandemic and still make claims about 'errors' made by governments without any evidence whatsoever to back them up - other than op-eds from the usual disinformation sources.
Linthat (who is obviously a vaccine doubter from his stance, i.e. the "free-thinking people" comment is a classic put down for us sheeple) voiced suspicion because he knows certain groups of people of certain ages who have developed health issues since vaccination. That is just anecdote, as is Laurent's quip that he knows similar people who haven't developed health issues following vaccination but have after infection. However, the publicly available data of which there is now an enormous amount doesn't care about anecdote - there is nothing in the data to show that the correlation does equal causation. There isn't an alternative view that has been suppressed, unless you think that the data has been falsified.
In fact, I'd take it further than this - it's not even as simple as this because the various public health authorities have themselves not held a consistent line based on the scientific data available and have changed or given recommendations due to political reasoning, not public health reasoning! For instance, Covid-19 is, without any doubt whatsoever, an airborne virus. The vast majority of people catch it from breathing aerosolised particles. Cloth masks don't do much to stop you catching it. Surgical masks do a bit more (though not much) but respirators (i.e. FFP2/FFP3 masks and their equivalents) are actually pretty effective when used correctly. The laws of physics don't care if you think masks work or not. They simply do. Despite this, here in the UK, there has never been any public information about using these respirator masks. None. When it was legally required for FFP2 or better masks to be used in some countries, any old face covering was allowable here. The UK authorities have continued to pretend that it is airborne droplets which transmit the virus so surgical masks are good enough, even for health workers, and, most damningly for me, have pushed the idea of fomite transmission - people still wash and sterilise their hands endlessly over here, whilst not wearing any masks which is mostly pointless - though perhaps not so much now that we're getting hit by influenza as well as Covid and our health system is on the brink of collapse.
I find these arguments very frustrating, because they simply have nothing to do with the scientific evidence available. These show that the vaccines are much more effective at keeping you healthy than initial infection with Covid (and boosters can reduce the chances of reinfection, especially among the most vulnerable groups). Masks work. Ventilation works. Testing and isolation when infected helps to stop the spread. Lockdowns were necessary during the worst of the waves when we were all immunologically naive to the virus.
These are all facts, proven by analysis of the data available and our scientific knowledge, yet a substantial proportion of the population doubt some or all of them, or even worse, think they are all lies told as part of some sort of insane conspiracy. Maddening!
WhiningKhan
Regular
That is a baseless argument at least where I live. One confirmed infection scratched you out the eligibility for booster shot.
XBB-1.5 may be the variant that people who've been able to avoid covid all this time finally succumb to because it binds more tightly to human cells than all previous variants.
It also may be one of the most if not the most contagious variant we've seen. It's seen very fast growth in the past month or two.
Reinfection is also a big threat as protection from previous infections and vaccinations wane.
There is no benefit from "natural immunity" because each infection makes one more prone to have severe re-infections.
Read in USA TODAY: https://apple.news/ACi9A47hASRKyEY1EJHvlUQ
Maybe the only good thing is that all the variants now are descended from Omicron, so virologists only have to concentrate on the one family, rather than delta, alpha, beta and other families of variants we've had before 2022.
It also may be one of the most if not the most contagious variant we've seen. It's seen very fast growth in the past month or two.
Reinfection is also a big threat as protection from previous infections and vaccinations wane.
There is no benefit from "natural immunity" because each infection makes one more prone to have severe re-infections.
Read in USA TODAY: https://apple.news/ACi9A47hASRKyEY1EJHvlUQ
Maybe the only good thing is that all the variants now are descended from Omicron, so virologists only have to concentrate on the one family, rather than delta, alpha, beta and other families of variants we've had before 2022.
So because I've said something you believe is wrong, you can assume anything you'd like about my position? I don't follow that logic, but I do appreciate the explanation
But I do find it quite arrogant that you just say "this isn't the case", and consider the subject closed though.
However, I do recognize that the prevalence of censorship cannot be an argument , but a premise or a view. It's not falsifiabe, not easily at least. So you can reject that if you will.
Hopefully the promised twitter reveals will show something on the matter, as they (as other tech companies) are in the unique position to do that.
Anyway, my argument was simply that if there were a conspiracy about vaccines (which I'm not claiming there is or isn't, my views are irrelevant here), due to the how the system is set up, there's a decent chance it would succeed, compared to how laughably improbabile we generally think them to be. I'm just painting a picture, in case anyone cares at all
Publication bias, difficulty to have research funded if it would question pandemic handling, proffesional isolation/humiliation of those who question pandemic handling, vaccine manufacturers' financial interests, drug regulation agencies being overwhelmingly funded by the manufacturers, politicians' unwiligness to admit mistakes, and the censorship of online and off line media.
These would all naturally converge to mask away any problems, if any of such problems would occur. To me, even if the above picture would have created the perfect pandemic response and saved the greatest ammount of lives, it's still ridiculous that we're easily accepting all the side effects. Side effects of having one point in the public agenda rule them all.
Whatever is legally requried to wear has a minor influence, doesn't mean the people will actually do it nor do it correctly. I don't think countries with mandatory FFP2 performed better at all, mine certainly hasn't.
Sorry, which argumets do you mean specifically?
CDC's data rather shows that the natural infection yields better protection than vaccines only. ( Of course, and I shouldn't have to say this, still a bad ideea to get infected first without being vaccinated )
Boosters indeed reduce the chance of re-infection, but that effect wears out in a few months. There was a also Portugal massive study which showed that infection aquired immunity was quite good at protecting against re infection, even from Omicron variants
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I don't understand this point. You seem to be saying that a naive immune system that has never experienced a disease will produce less severe infections than an immune system that has repeated exposure and recovery? A person on their fourth bout of COVID19 is more likely to experience a severe case than someone on their first? If every reinfection increases the chance of a bad outcome, why aren't hospitalisations increasing with each wave instead of decreasing? How can there be 'no benefit' at all from natural immunity?
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No I mean compared to getting vaccinated, not compared to naive immunity.
In fact some young Chinese are purposely getting infected instead of getting vaccinated now.
But above all there's a value to avoiding infections and re-infections as much as you can, avoid indoor public venues, mask, etc.
There actually was a paper on this, reported by media sometime in spring 2022, and findding that each subsequent infection would have greater risk of serious illness.
But yeah it goes against everything we've ever known about immunity so far so I personally can only ignore it for now. Would be interesting if some1 would dig more though into it of course
That's potentially unwise. However, I think different reports come to different conclusions. Africa and India appear to show places with limited vaccinations going on to have far lower ongoing C19 than places with strong vaccinations. I don't think there's any clear insight still with this disease.
I disagree. Avoiding disease makes you more vulnerable due to weaker immune response, leading you to need to avoid more, leading to a weaker immune system and greater vulnerability. Once you have a decent level of resistance, exposure is what keeps your immune system active and capable, adapting to new threats as they appear. If we have masks to stop C19 spreading, we stop everything spreading, our immune systems switch off, and then when we take the masks off, we'll have a worse response than we after C19 lockdowns.
There's still much that medical science needs to learn about how nature deals with pathogen resistance and it's too early to draw blanket conclusions like alwasy seeking to avoid reinfections. I'm still of the opinion that infection conditions play a role in level of infection and milder exposure leads to milder illness.
Yeah that's a novel theory, that you have to have some exposure to pathogens so your immune system is ready for it.
Problem with that is that we had all kinds of exposure to pathogens, especially in crowded cities, for all our lives. Then a novel coronavirus came along and turned the world upside down.
Our previous exposure to beta coronavirus wasn't cross-protective enough.
Nor all the flu strains which have circulated for hundreds or thousands of years, every flu season we're vulnerable.
And if you take that attitude, think about the days before we had things like polio vaccines. Did getting exposed to polio unvaccinated make those people stronger or just more liable to become paralyzed?
As far as avoiding infections and especially reinfections, we don't know the true cause of Long Covid but one of the theories is that not all the virus is cleared by the immune system. Even inactivated virions may not be benign, for instance one of the problems is micro clots suspected of being caused by covid.
Then there's the fact that the virus will damage organ tissue so you may get a cumulative effect with repeated infections.
Finally, this thing is believed to be able to cross the blood brain barrier:
www.nature.com
I don't mean live in a literal bubble to avoid infection. I mean just taking those practices to minimize the odds of getting infected.
Problem with that is that we had all kinds of exposure to pathogens, especially in crowded cities, for all our lives. Then a novel coronavirus came along and turned the world upside down.
Our previous exposure to beta coronavirus wasn't cross-protective enough.
Nor all the flu strains which have circulated for hundreds or thousands of years, every flu season we're vulnerable.
And if you take that attitude, think about the days before we had things like polio vaccines. Did getting exposed to polio unvaccinated make those people stronger or just more liable to become paralyzed?
As far as avoiding infections and especially reinfections, we don't know the true cause of Long Covid but one of the theories is that not all the virus is cleared by the immune system. Even inactivated virions may not be benign, for instance one of the problems is micro clots suspected of being caused by covid.
Then there's the fact that the virus will damage organ tissue so you may get a cumulative effect with repeated infections.
Finally, this thing is believed to be able to cross the blood brain barrier:
SARS-CoV-2 crosses the blood–brain barrier accompanied with basement membrane disruption without tight junctions alteration - Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy
SARS-CoV-2 has been reported to show a capacity for invading the brains of humans and model animals. However, it remains unclear whether and how SARS-CoV-2 crosses the blood–brain barrier (BBB). Herein, SARS-CoV-2 RNA was occasionally detected in the vascular wall and perivascular space, as well...
www.nature.com
I don't mean live in a literal bubble to avoid infection. I mean just taking those practices to minimize the odds of getting infected.
I wasn't low key calling people names or trying to throw anyone under the bus with my comment. When I said "free thinking" I was meaning it in the sense of people looking for answers that aren't part of the narrative being espoused by TV or media in general. To me, there's nothing wrong with looking for answers and asking questions. As for the rest of the post you're referencing, I was just sharing two personal examples that's all.
And to be fair, to your point about alternative views not being suppressed, you're not 100% correct there. Twitter was either shadow banning or outright banning people left and right who questioned Covid and other things. As we recently seen from the "Twitter files" there's been plenty of confirmation that there was a narrative being driven and concerns being suppressed. The funniest item I came across from that was a person finding out that there were 10 doctors that were all referencing one another and it appeared that they were ALL bots lol. So yeah, there's some not above board stuff happening all because people have questions/concerns.