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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 suppose your gcentral point is that "A lot more outrageous things other than the covid response are concurrently being done, why devote so much bandwidth to that?"

You can reach that conclusion if you think the covid response is entirely in the domain of politics. Which it more or less has been. Evidenced by the vastly different restrictions by country/region.

However, here's a counterpoint. It shouldn't have been. And that is very hard for people to swallow. The covid fiasco turned me into a conflict theorist.

Covid is an outside threat. Its the natural world vs humans. If there was ever any time for all sides of the political aisle to cooperate, it was against against covid. It was prime time for mistake theorists to shine. As opposed to immigration, foreign conflict or almost any other CW issue; the threat of covid could have been minimized using hard scientific metrics. Just argue out the methods, tally up the costs and benefits, let the process of "doing science" deal with it, problem solved....

LMFAO that totally happened! Instead we got vibes based methods (mask mandates, they just work), copying CCP with no regard for cost/benefits (lockdowns), shit that makes no sense (travel bans after local spread), multiple instances absolute retardism (killing 17 million minks ???), LIES LIES LIES (lab leak hypothesis, vaccines 1,2,3,4,5,6,9000), I think I don't need to reiterate any further, its a dead horse.

It showed that being correct or effective is worth noting at all. It's all about the vibes. Our ideas are amazing their ideas are icky. It's nice when our ideas work too, but that's secondary. What you really need is social capital. You need people to get the right vibes off of you, and you can do whatever you want, you are the science!

I suppose if you were sufficiently jaded, this wouldn't have been nothing new. But I and many others were probably not as jaded. Some of us thought that problems will be solved using the most objective means possible with regards to practicality and efficiency and etc, you know.. competence ?

Having that illusion broken was a watershed moment for me. I still continue to talk about covid because it possibly can't be like this, all the way down. There has to be some hope right?

Covid measures are very much the equivalent of TSA, the Patriot Act, Shock and Awe, and terror threat levels for people born after 1999 or so. A wakeup call that "respectable" organs of society are often (a) incompetent, run by gladhanding careerists who are trying to implement policies that make themselves look useful while filling the political checkboxes they've been handed (b) cynically trying to push through unpopular reforms by not letting a good crisis go to waste.

Reflecting on Covid (or the War on Terror) is useful. There's a good saying that goes something like "Who you are in adversity is who you always were." Well, the government you see in a crisis is the government you always have.