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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.
You didn’t pay attention to this stuff back in 2020? We discussed it extensively at the motte.
Pfizer execs didn’t have to “acknowledge” that they didn’t test for transmission reduction, it was quite obvious from the get go, based on the actual design of the clinical studies. This was never seen as a requirement for approval.
It sure would have been nice if vaccines stopped transmission, and many (including me) believed at the time that the vaccines will in fact do so. This turning out not to be the case was initially a big disappointment, and then, when they started doing forceful vaccination mandates when we already knew they don’t do shit for stopping transmission, was pushing me into white rage every time I thought about it. Nevertheless, the actual studies never tested that.
The reason was twofold: first, the higher priority was to figure out if there actually is reduction in symptoms and negative outcomes — this is what was meant by “efficacy”. Initial studies used for approval showed pretty huge risk reductions, on the order of 90% reduction in having observable Covid symptoms with positive tests. I don’t believe that anyone believes that the vaccines have this good efficacy at blocking symptoms today. I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy. Maybe it’s because the vaccines were targeting original variant, and the virus evolved to be much better at spreading. Maybe the elevated response from vaccine lasts for very short time, couple of months at most. I don’t know, stopped paying attention at Covid science altogether somewhere in the middle of 2021, when I realized that the science and the truth were mostly irrelevant for the policies and narratives.
Second, it is actually pretty hard to design a study that measures efficacy at stopping transmission with any good degree of confidence that would be approved by IRB, a notoriously NIMLY (Not In My LaboratorY) bodies. Useful studies are “””unethical””” to run, so we’ll let the virus spread to billions and kill millions without trying to understand how it does so through direct experiment, instead we collectively decided to just watch its shadows on the cave’s wall.
Yes, I agree with you that most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy. But, dude, Covid is so last year, we already litigated this here to death, there is probably nothing new you can say here on this topic that hasn’t been already said last year by others. At this point, I’m so over it that I’m actually puzzled when someone around me even brings up Covid unironically. I will never trust the “””experts””” on this, or any other topic that actually matters to the society ever again, but, again, I already said it last year as well. It’s over, current thing is different now.
Well, it's still the anti-covid measures that, as far as I can tell, are the single worst thing that ever happened to me through no fault of my own, and the impact of which is still very palpable, and the perpetrators of which are currently getting away with it because the public at large is over it and I am not yet willing to let it go. Not until bodies have hit the floor, until heads have rolled, or until apologies have been spoken.
I'm biased in the opposite direction: My parents are 65 years old. In that age group, there was a 10% chance of death given infection in 2020. If one of my parents (~19% chance) had died, it would unquestionably have been the worst thing that had ever happened to me. In comparison, the lockdowns are a tiny footnote of badness. Covid was on an exponential trajectory and there were no vaccines, so I am incredibly glad that the lockdowns happened.
You know, early on in 2020 I also heard that covid would be very bad for the elderly and, as someone who takes filial piety seriously, I locked myself down tight. Stayed at home for months, didn't see anyone, wore masks and gloves and disinfected everything all the time, was disappointed that the borders weren't closed. In summer, an tiny outdoor family party was organized under the conditions that everyone would maintain maximum security measures. Turns out that a few minutes in everyone reverted to old habits and dropped the masks and distancing, much to my surprise. And a few weeks later parties were cropping up all over the place with nary a thought to the supposedly dangerous disease running rampant, and I was the only one who still stuck to the interpretation that if the disease is as dangerous as we're told, we should behave accordingly. Not even the sick and elderly were noticeably careful anymore, and there I was excusing myself and going home after waving at people from a distance. And I caught covid anyways, so much for masks and disinfectants and distancing and isolation.
And then came the vaccines and everyone rejoiced and got jabbed and continued with life as before. I declined the jab because, as I thought, I'd already had the disease so what's the point. But oh boy, did I ever miss the point! Because from that point on as everyone enjoyed normal social and family life, they sure as hell gave me a wide berth. Uninvited to gatherings, told not to visit, regularly insulted for not getting vaccinated, treated as if I were not even one vector among many but the primary source of the disease. Told in no uncertain terms that only the unvaccinated were to blame for the pandemic in the first place, that it would all be over if not for them. Rejected by polite society, by friends and even by family, for not getting this fantastic vaccine and apparently being at fault for the whole mess. For all of 2021. And then came the long, lean winter of 21/22 in which not only all the previous still held, but the vaccine mandate hung over our heads as absolutely imminent. Politics were certain, media were certain, the public seemed certain, that soon everyone would either be vaxed or imprisoned or fined until they were either of the other two. It took politics a while to get the mandate passed, but in the meantime all kinds of measures against the unvaccinated were discussed and some of them enforced. Not measures against the virus, mind you, but purely against the unvaxed. I don't know what exactly prevented the mandate from coming to pass, but those were fun months, never knowing what the next rule against you would be, what form of social participation would be banned next, or which public and tax-funded institution would no longer admit those monstrous unvaccinateds, or whether they'd go through with forcing employers to fire the unvaccinated. I still don't know what exactly prevented the mandates in the end; I suppose politics got cold feet when it came to ruining the livelihoods of millions of people and/or imprisoning them. Public and media condemned them for not getting the job done, though.
And then everyone, vaxed or not, got covid. And survived with no lasting harm. And quietly shut up about everything in what should have been a very embarrassing silence but instead just turned out to be a giant memory hole.
As you can tell by the wall of text, I am still rather sore about the whole business. We often talk about social trust as in to what a degree can you trust individuals simply because they are of the same society as you. I think there was another kind of social trust, trust that society will not turn on you at the drop of a hat for no good reason, and that one died.
I think I have been much to gentle with my compatriots. I was too happy to be allowed back at the tables. I have neglected to spit bile in their faces and return their insults and make clear to them that in spite of my love for them, I detest them and will never again be able to muster the same kind of trust in them that I took for granted in better times. I shall resolve to do so from now on. My disappointment may not be infinite, but it is a deep dark well and I will draw from it extensively before it runs dry.
Why did I ever just let it slide? This is not to be let slid.
I'm sorry for you, but none of that happened to me. My parents and me have still managed to avoid getting Covid. I haven't, or haven't met anyone who, slagged off on people who weren't gonna get vaccinated. (Aside from "well that's weird.") I've personally always considered "getting infected" to be equivalent or better to vaccination. On the other hand, my workplace forced a coworker with children and asthma (vaccinated, but still) to come in to work (when we're well set up for wfh) when we've had several infections in the company, and also took the absolute minimum of legally required steps. So I have a somewhat different reference class for Covid skeptics.
I went to an ACX meetup while in the middle of Covid. We were all vaccinated, otherwise healthy, and sat outside with good minimum distance. This was also the only time i was around a bunch of people with the Covid Warn app in the wild. I was also at LWCW, we did mandatory Covid tests on arrival and every morning, which seems to have avoided spread at the event. Maybe your social group is just .. not good.
That may well be. We Germans like us a witch hunt every now and then.
How confident are you that
a) lockdowns kept your parents from getting infected and
b) an infection would have been lethal for at least one of them?
Well, as mentioned, there was a 10% in that age group, so combined 20%. Chance of infection is the big one I'm not sure about, because we were looking at an exponential; at early doubling rates, a few weeks delay in imposing a lockdown could make the difference between single-digit percentage and near certainty. It's also unclear though how much of an effect mandated lockdowns would have had, given that some groups of people locked down voluntarily. I don't have a good mental model for spread here that accounts for groups with divergent risk preferences; how many degrees of distance really are there in a population? If Germany is a small-world network on a weekly scale, then assuming nobody locked down at all you'd see total spread in something like five hops. That's not what we saw, but we also don't have a good control for it. On the other hand, my parents are very pre-internet and would definitely not have done daily purchases, food etc., online. (Otherwise I'd have been very blasé about it; they had basically no other in-person social contacts through the early pandemic.) If it got to a point where there was a solid (single-digit per visit) chance of infection when visiting a supermarket, they would almost certainly have got it.
At the current stage I'm resigned to them getting it eventually; lethality is still down and they're multiply-vaccinated, so I just have to accept the diceroll. No reason not to push it out though; our tools for dealing with severe infections only improve over time.
Sidenote: IMO the strongest argument for school lockdowns is that schooling connects lots of otherwise-separate social groups. Same for WFH. I'm imagining a model of "societal layers", where each layer is a class of contact groups. Typical layers are friends/family, schools, and the workplace. Given ingroup isolation, you'd expect an infection to bounce through societal layers of connection to reach otherwise-isolated subgroups. In-person meeting, classroom, family, workplace, in-person meeting, etc. I don't know how much effect cutting one of those layers would have, but I believe cutting all but one of them would slow spread massively. Ie. if you have online schooling and WFH, then in-person meetings alone don't matter much. If you mandate social distancing and shut down schools, you can relax WFH, etc. On the other hand, if you don't do WFH and don't do social distancing, you might as well keep schools open.
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My dad is twenty years older than that. He just took care of himself rather than expecting thousands of other people to lose their jobs and not speak to each other in an entirely symbolic effort to protect him.
Not that he's ever particularly social in the first place, really... Not sure he even noticed anything different:
"Sorry, I don't eat at restaurants"
"Oh, because of Corona?"
"No, all their other beers are terrible too"
It's very challenging to take care of yourself without regularly being within six feet of many other humans.
Sorry you're being downvoted, but it really is trivial for an elderly person who doesn't have constant doctor appointments to virtually eliminate their risk. And there's very little other people could do that would complement those precautions rather than substitute for them, no matter how much effort the general public put in; all restaurants being shut down by public order doesn't give any extra help to an ancient who has already sensibly decided not to go to restaurants.
The whole thing was a generalized guilt trip intended to make people suffer pointlessly so they felt like "part of the cause"
I guess it depends on how used you are to ordering online? A lot of the risk area is shops.
If you're living somewhere with lots of foot traffic you also can't go anywhere, though that wasn't the case for me.
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Even the Great Barrington Declaration called for devoting resources to help isolate the elderly while everyone else moved on, and not just leave the elderly to figure it out or not whatever.
Yeah, throwing all policy weight behind that would have actually done something at a relatively trivial cost.
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