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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.
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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