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Notes -
I think you can use this sort of pseudo-science to justify vaccines post hoc. You can also use the same pseudo-science to justify not taking them at all.
I know quite a few people who got lasting side effects from the Covid vax, and it’s nearly heretical to talk about it. (These are people I know IRL, not internet reports) That alone makes me extremely skeptical about anyone saying how there are ~zero risks from any and all vaccines. Why is there a giant propaganda campaign to cover up the risks? Am I just some crazy statistical outlier who knows 3+ people very closely who’ve been vaccine maimed, even though it “hardly ever occurs” in the general population? I wouldn’t bet on that
People win the lottery despite the odds not being in their favor.
If you've bought a ticket, and then you find a million pounds in your bank account, then congratulations, knowing that the odds were stacked against you doesn't mean you've not won.
I know literally zero people who have been "vaccine maimed". I used to be responsible for a COVID ICU before vaccines too, and I can definitely tell you that I saw plenty die of it.
It is far more likely that you are either:
Lying. On the internet, anyone can be a dog, or claim to be one.
Mistaken.
Surrounded by people who are mistaken or lying.
Assuming 150 people you could "closely know" (Dunbar's number as a first approximation), then someone, somewhere, out there in the world will find 3 people who were harmed by vaccines. Because vaccines are not perfectly safe, and I've never claimed that. If you consider people who are mistaken about their illness being caused by a vaccine, then the number skyrockets.
I don't know one single person who had lasting adverse effects from the vaccine. This includes professionally. I do know many with acute effects (including myself).
I've also met a few people who have made claims of adverse effects but they've all been clearly mistaken (typically it involves active mental illness, or sometimes other clear medical causes of the problem which they attribute to COVID).
I'll be real with you, I find the fact that you're being downvoted so heavily rather frustrating.
We're both doctors, and we're not perfect. Most doctors aren't perfect either, but I would expect you'd agree with me when I say the majority of our colleagues are smart, conscientious people who genuinely want to do right by the people who see them.
We've conceded that vaccines have risks. We've pointed out scenarios where vaccination might be technically net positive, but of such minuscule effect that people shouldn't run around screaming because they've missed a shot. We've pointed out circumstances where the calculations change, and that vaccination schedules are made for the whole population, and not just for conscientious upper middle class nerds who take care of their health.
If I was being paid at US rates, you'd bet I'd walk any neurotic person through an entire questionnaire that ticks off boxes and adds up net QALYs for any given vaccine. This isn't really feasible at scale, and mass media is necessarily something that must scale and reach the LCD.
Yet I see more FUD than I want to here. Somehow the whole profession is discredited by covid, even though quite a few doctors would happily tell you that the way the pandemic was handled was far from perfect.
It all strikes me as a gross over-correction. The public should trust the medical field and the US government less because of our errors, but some people are throwing out the unvaccinated baby with the bath water.
I know we've got more than our fair share of contrarians, the Motte encourages their presence, but damn.
The impression I've gotten in my time here is that most people are pretty much just smart enough, with a side helping of tech-bro-ism.
Medicine seems easy/simple from the outside in a large part because most people here are young and healthy and don't interact with the complicated parts of the field. Most people here also don't exist in fields where a lit review is a thing (in a large part because most of the people who do that are far left at this point). A half assed opinion piece is considered an authority and their's no need to read primary source material or contra narrative information critically.
We (docs) also get used to hardcore digging in because of skin in the game. If I pick the wrong medicine my patient fucking dies. That means I'm naturally going to have much more "informed" commitment to my medical views (even when they turn out to be a wrong) than somebody arguing on the internet without significant consequence.
Add in the political climate - nothing I say when defending medicine is going to do anything to separate me seeming like one of "those" COVID people to skeptics.
All those types of things together and more and you get my downvotes and the vitriol.
You should use this as a Gell-Mann Amnesia moment however. As my media diet continues to improve I get access to more and more better primary source material and you see things like rampant factual inaccuracy here on other topics outside of medicine that I've just happened to have been informed about.
We are still pretty good here! But outside of a few reliable posters you'll see a lot of very confidently stated low information stuff being promulgated.
Ultimately most of the people still complaining about COVID are having a tantrum. I get why they are having a tantrum, I was not happy about some of the policy decisions - but it's still a throwing the baby out with the bathwater moment.
Fortunately for my sanity, I've filtered my Twitter feed to the extent that the most profound cases of retardation miss me haha.
This is what irks me the most. Short of going full Dr. Phil and taking up full-blown vaccine denialism, what can I say to people with that mindset and convince them? It's an utter mode collapse, there are certainly people in this thread who have views more nuanced than "all vaccines are amazing and harmless" and "vaccines are designed to turn you into a gay frog", but it confuses me.
I'm rather fortunate that medicine was never this politicized either in India or the UK. There isn't the same degree of digging in of heels and treating arguments as soldiers rather than an attempt to establish empirical fact.
COVID lockdowns were a bust, but even if they'd curbed the disease, I'm unsure if it was worth it if it pissed off tens of millions of people in the States to the point that even basic medical knowledge became untrustworthy.
Do these people not note that there are >180 other countries out there? If vaccines were a scam or net harmful, then you'd find at least a few countries that rejected them wholesale. The only ones without state vaccination programs are absolute basket-cases, and even they have the sense to accept foreign medical aid.
...which was repeatedly stated at the start of the pandemic by people who were later denounced as COVID deniers and largely memory-holed since then.
(I'd love to give references, but for the obvious problem with this.)
I don't necessarily disbelieve you. But the level of justification for lockdowns at Day Zero, 30, 90 and 365 varied significantly.
Remember that in the very early days, we genuinely weren't sure of COVID's CFR, if there's a disease that's spreading like wildfire and you aren't sure it won't kill tens or hundreds of millions, then I think an initial lockdown is sensible. Once it becomes clear that it's nowhere as bad as it was thought, and the primary risk was for old and sick people, then lockdowns should have been lifted. I don't think that this was obvious until several months in, and I was doing my best to stay abreast. There was genuine terror that I and other doctors could catch it, and that it had a very real chance of killing us. I think around 3 months in, I was personally feeling safer, but still worried about spreading it to the elderly members of my family, and still was right up till vaccines became available.
I think an initial plea of "this is looking like it could be a pandemic: please restrict social contact", along with the governmental support to allow people to do so*, would have been a very good idea and would have been sensible in such a case. This is not the same as a government-enforced lockdown, especially one as hamfistedly done as COVID was.
In some ways this is less effective than an outright lockdown; this is far less likely to cause widespread backlash.
Of course, it's now in many ways a moot point. That credibility was burnt; this is close enough that it was caught in the backlash and also wouldn't be feasible now.
[* e.g. government-financed no-questions-asked refunds for travel, decrees that workers must be able to take sick days, vacation, or leave without retaliation for the next X days, that sort of thing. I am overall very much against Big Government, but as long as we're already taking the downsides...]
I think the primary place our calculations here differ is mine includes the time lost in lockdown in the downside. If you lock people up for a hundred man-years to save one person, you haven't actually gained much of anything.
This pushes the tipping point earlier (assuming lockdowns in the first place).
My bigger issue here is that I've heard a growing amount of attempted retroactive changes of the narrative, of the same people who were proclaiming on day 90 that LOCKDOWNS MUST CONTINUE who are now backing off and attempting to say they were saying otherwise on day 90.
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