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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 tried skimming the top few responses to your post to see if I had anything to add. I see a very wide range of perspectives on this, both internally in my own mind and across my diverse friend group.

I am not addressing your discomfort with policies, because I share many of them.

A practical anecdote because my dad has severe COPD

My household (girlfriend, brother, father, myself) all got covid last December. My father is 72, has COPD, diabetes (afaik reduces ability to heal the body to SOME degree), 1 partially collapsed lung that never recovered after hospitalization, severely overweight, etc. etc. etc. He's on all the medicines. While he's surprisingly spry for someone in his condition it is clear that he is highly at risk from a respiratory illness. Even the cold makes me worry.

We got vaccinated summer 2021, and my father got boosted about 2 weeks before I caught Covid. Normally, he takes a while to recover from colds and other things, but he had a markedly shorter infection with Covid than my brother and girlfriend. He was like 2-4 days. I was 3-5 days and my brother and girlfriend took about 7 days to get back to normal.

Yes, there's luck involved, but luck must also get applied on a bell curve, right? How likely do I find it that the "vaccine" didn't perform it's utility function appropriately by giving my father increased active antibodies for a while?

Does that mean I support mandatory vaccination policies? Absolutely not, but I also push back against this idea that the vaccine doesn't do anything, or shouldn't have been approved or delivered to people.

Vaccine legitimacy

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.)

People seem to mix up "totally eliminates risk from a virus" and "primes the immune system in some meaningful way." A lot of people wanted total protection from the Covid virus, and what we got was a priming of our immune system to a virus which mutates rapidly. I feel like some of your argument falls (E.g. using "vaccines" in quotes) in to word games in order to discount the utility of priming the immune systems of the population.

If there was a medical intervention that reduced the chances of catching HIV or cancer by some amount (20, 50, 90%), how many people in the population would take it? At what efficacy threshold would you take a pill or injection against a form of cancer?

There was a really good ZDogg MD podcast with Paul Offit (on the CDC vaccine advisory board, voted against youth boosters based on the evidence presented to CDC [maybe that increases his credibility?]) https://zdoggmd.com/paul-offit-10/

They get in to some of the technical details on why a vaccine for a rapidly mutating corona virus has no chance of totally stopping the virus, and how that compares to a virus with different characteristics. The technical details matter.

If consenting adults want to take an experimental medicine, I have no problem with that.

But when medical experimentation is mandated, at risk of losing your job, or ability to participate in society, then I have a huge problem with it. I see it as a brazen violation of the Nuremberg Code by the authorities.