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Notes -
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
None of the mandates make any sense, (except perhaps in terms of financial profit.)
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.
This is a very interesting topic for me. Originally the vaccines were touted as "efficient and safe". The original promise during the first round of the vaccine was definitely as effective against spread - it was one of the main drivers for vaccination of certain number of people in order to achieve herd immunity. New York Times in September 2021 said that
It was then increased by some percentage points until the new story emerged that vaccines are only there to prevent severe risks of infection. Please do mind you, that originally due to herd immunity goal it was supposed that all people including children should receive the vaccine. Vaccine was literally touted as replacement for lockdown, there were literally "traffic light" systems where severity of lockdown was based on vaccination rate like this example from New Zealand
What followed is that the "or infect other people" part was dropped down as if it never existed. I will end here, but this level of amnesia of things that were blasted 24x7 all over the media and government communication is quite frankly astounding. And I am not singling you out, I have met people who had the same stance toward vaccine as you, where they literally replaced the latest narrative as if it was always the case. But to be frank it is quite scary, mostly because it hugely impedes any learnings from the current pandemic ranging from original designation of "COVID scare is racist" through "WHO says no evidence of human-to-human spread" through "no evidence that masks work" to "mask mandates" to "cloth masks do not work" to "vaccines make people less likely to infect other people" to now where we say that "experts" were always right.
It seems insane to me and do not even get me about "Lab Leak conspiracy" theory. Because yeah, a country of 1.4 billion is origin of novel coronavirus and it happens by chance that Wuhan - one of 100 Chinese cities above population of 1 million - was epicenter of the virus. And BTW it is also the only place in China where there is also Biosafety level 4 Wuhan Institute of Epidemiology that coincidentally happens to research novel coronaviruses. All the stellar Pulitzer journalists did not see anything there to investigate the biggest story of 21st century so far, not enough incentives to go deeper. Quite contrary: to ask questions about potential leak was deemed as conspiracy. For me it is incredible for journalists who regularly look for weak links - like politician getting donation from corporation only for year later to vote in favor of them, they saw nothing suspicious in such a huge red flag. And not only that, they were lock in step to suppress the story.
Because as of January 20, 2021, vaccines were still incredibly precious and our elite were fighting with each other to be first in line. It was about two months before my very elderly parents got theirs.
Now, did the media blue-checks go from "lol of course there will be no vaccine mandates, look how people are fighting to get them, stop worrying" to "lol of course there are vaccine mandates that is what it means to live in a society" in the space of a few months? Yes.
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Speaking of Biden, here's a pretty famous quote from July 2021:
I have no doubt that specific scientific writing was clear that a reduction in infections was a probabilistic thing and might wane as time goes on, but here you have the most powerful man in the world, whose administration was trying to mandate the vaccines in various ways and is still requiring them for entering the country as a foreigner, confidently stating that they confer sterile immunity. I'd say that outweighs whatever science reporting or personal anecdotes from upper-class London you can bring to the table.
Throwing in my own anecdotes, the German press was absolutely completely on the same wavelength as Biden here, solid looking and repeated promises about immunity against infection were like 95% of the reason I myself got vaccinated. A common talking point in German (social) media in early 2021 was how Israel had "vaccinated away" its Delta wave. For months on end, even as the divergence steadily shrank and several scandals in data collection undermined its trustworthiness, public health authorities and their lackies in the media obsessed over the differences in unvaccinated and vaccinated case rates, a talking point that is now completely forgotten.
Mainstream COVID discourse was 100% thoroughly permeated with the idea that the vaccines are going to stop transmission up until late summer 2021. This only started to go away in the fall and died completely with the emergence of Omicron.
It wasn't really an out-of-line thing to say in July 2021; once vaccines became widely available infection rates plummeted. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the vaccine rollout began in earnest in January but appointments were hard to come by. Over the next couple months eligibility and availability would slowly expand, and by mid-April nearly everyone was eligible and it was easy to get an appointment. On April 19 there was a rolling average of nearly 5,000 cases per day. By the 4th of July this had dropped to less than 200, a 97% decrease. When infections started picking up again at the end of July, it was in places with notoriously low vaccine uptake and almost always among unvaccinated individuals. Given this situation, what was Biden supposed to think? Yeah, later that summer and heading into fall breakthrough cases became much more common, rates rose in areas with high vaccine uptake, and Omicron eventually blew everything out of the water, but for most of that summer it really looked like we had whipped the pandemic.
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I'm afraid "might wane as time goes on" is the sort of thing I saw in scientific papers but sadly never in the news ... But the news was quite solid on "probabilistic thing". Literally the very first sentence from the Pfizer press release was Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective, and I don't recall news reports omitting that. News readers, on the other hand ... even news readers leading the free world? We mock or pity the innumeracy of the Pirahã, unable to count to ten, but how many of us can hold "90%" in our heads indefinitely without just rounding it up to 100...
I'm currently reading HPMOR with my younger kids, and we just hit the chapter where "It would be like a Muggle newspaper testing political candidates to rate their level of scientific literacy." is thrown out as an example of cultural changes that really really ought to happen but never ever will.
I don't want that to happen. You'd get the same kind of people rating the candidates on scientific literacy that are currently rating "misinformation" in social media or who run "fact-checking" websites.
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Okay, I get your point that you were part of enlightened community that knew what WHO message was false and what was correct, maybe you had some link to researchers and all that. You had privilege to act individually, you were probably one of the "nonessential workers" who could do so. But then I have to challenge you about your quote (bolded):
You meant "literally all my 20 friends who knew what's what" or is it "literally" billions affected and probably hundreds of millions of shills?
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