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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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https://rumble.com/v1nhpkq-eu-parliament-member-rob-roos-asked-a-pfizer-representative-at-a-hearing-if.html

Apparently a Pfizer executive acknowledged to some European council of wise elders that, due to moving "at the speed of science," they never tested for transmission reduction in the vaccine.

Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)

What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?

Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?

Why were people fired from their jobs and as recently as last week members of the US military were "other-than-honorably" discharged because they didn't inject the "vaccine"?

It seems people were fired for their own health, since the jabs didnt prevent transmission.

What is actually going on? I understand the argument of vaccine mandates if they prevent transmission, (even though I dislike it, and disagree, I understand the argument.) But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?

There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose. If I dosed millions of people with two shots of saline water and only counted them as vaccinated two weeks after the second saline shot, the statistics would appear such that the "saline vaccinated" were less likely to get Covid.

On Twitter, I see many many people now claiming that noone ever said the vaccines would stop the spread, they merely reduce the severity. But that feels like a bad plot forced retcon for a soap opera. Why did we shut down schools? Why did the leaders of France, UK, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the USA all say horrible things about the "unvaccinated" and the "Antivaxxers"?

Again, I don't like it, but I could almost understand it in the context of a 100% efficacious vaccine that stopped infection and transmission. But if it never substantially stopped transmission then

  1. None of the mandates make any sense, (except perhaps in terms of financial profit.)

  2. Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.

(Geert's website: https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/)

Just for transparency, I am a staunch antivaxxer. My wife pressured me to get the jab in summer of 2020. I asked for more time. The argument of social responsibility did carry weight with me at the time. But in July of 2020 the Israeli data showed that the jabs did not prevent infection.

It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.

I keep seeing this clip (and then people referencing it in other media) all over the conservative internet, along with conservative people drawing the same conclusions, that this is some bombshell piece of evidence that will tear apart the myth of vaccine mandates. Let me be clear: I want this, and the conclusion to be true, because I want a piece of bulletproof evidence that I can use against people who still believe that mandatory vaccination was and still is the best way to go. I don't like those people or their mandates, and I'd like to argue against them with very firm evidence. But I'm skeptical that this clip is that, especially because I haven't really seen anyone on the other side acknowledging anything about it, whether it's to eat crow or argue back. It seems to me to be potentially something where the conservatives once again think they have rock solid proof of something, but it never goes further than that, because we never even hear the other side's response to it, because it's so miniscule that they don't even have to acknowledge it. In other words, the same old of people living in different universes.

Let me say again, I hope I eat the above words. I want to steelman this particular clip and conclusion, by attacking it the way its opponents may attack it. So here are some questions:

  1. There's a weird splice in the video between Roos and Pfizer woman. Are we in-fact seeing something that was edited to look like some sort of damning admission, instead of an actual damning admission?

  2. Pfizer woman says "did we know about stopping immunization before it entered the market". She doesn't say "transmission" or "spread" or "reinfection" or whatever, she says "immunization", which seems to make no sense in the context presented. Was this a clip that was taken out of context to make it sound like she was really trying to refer to the question Roos asked, but it was about something else?

  3. Does this have any implications on other vaccines and their trials, like Moderna or J&J?

  4. Even if the vaccine was not explicitly tested for transmission, was it still a reasonable assumption for them to make that it could have a decent chance to stop transmission? Or was it a reasonable assumption for politicians to make, and there was just some information lost in the shuffle?

  5. I don't know much about Roos, I've never heard of him before, but does he have much bipartisan cred? He comes off in the whole clip like a conservative commentator the likes of Tucker Carlson, gloating about how he just owned some lib. He even has a gotcha-like printout saying "Pfizer CEO? Where is Transparency?" in front of him when he asks the question, as if he's only asking as a formality and has already drawn his conclusions. The way he comes off, and the above edits and strangeness makes this whole conclusion that this is a death-blow to the conspiracy of vaccine mandates seem somewhat non-credible.

I don't know much about Roos, I've never heard of him before, but does he have much bipartisan cred?

Who has bi-partisan cred these days?

Tom Hanks apparently, for one.