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Your post suggests that you're talking about yourself rather than your child, which is a relief. But I have to ask, what negatives do you forsee from getting vaccinated so much that you'd risk getting the diseases they protect against?
thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, sometimes abbreviated to TTS
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It feels like your position is based more on political contrarianism than statistical sense.
Like, I get it, governments got authoritarian and petty when it came to vaccines. I couldn't buy a beer in a German biergarten because I didn't have the right vaccine passport app, while all my friends (who I was sitting with) were allowed to, as if the beer somehow facilitated the transmission of the virus. That was dumb. But you're not sticking it to the wokes by not getting a vaccine, you're just increasing the chance that you get ill or (God forbid) die from a preventable disease.
I left it to others to reply to your comment with the heart condition Myocarditis.
TTS is the unusual, rare blood clot syndrome.
Traditional standards of efficacy for vaccines make taking the vaccine an individual decision. If Alfred gets vaccinated, Alfred is protected and so doesn't care that Boris refused the vaccine. Boris can notice that the death toll was concentrated among the frail elderly. Deaths among the young were exclusively due to vulnerability caused by pre-existing serious health conditions. If Boris is a healthy young person, statistical sense is to notice that he is not personally at risk, and to be deterred from taking the vaccine by even rare vaccine side effects, if they hit the young and healthy.
One systematic problem is that one knows the intended effect of the vaccine. If people are still coming down with the disease, then it is clear that the vaccine has low efficacy. But one does not know ahead of time what the side effects are going to be. They are easy to miss or ignore especially in the context of for-profit drug discovery. The decision about whether to take a new vaccine involves a judgement call about the appropriate safety factor. One needs to multiply the dangers of acknowledged side effects by this safety factor to adjust for the systematic under reporting inherent in the researchers not knowing what to look out for.
A second systematic problem is that societies that mandate vaccines are counting down to corruption of the approvals process. An informed choice about getting vaccinated depends on knowing how long is left in the count down, and that information is a closely guarded secret.
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It was more like 4/10k if you happened to be in the susceptible group (young males) that we know of -- it's absolutely a possibility that low-grade heart damage was quite widespread, as only the severe cases would have been noticed/recorded.
And assuming that he's in that group (and doesn't also have cancer or something) his odds of dying from covid were essentially zero -- so the behaviour was pretty rational, really -- unlike your popping out of the woodwork to criticize his personal decisions.
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Man I don’t care. I will discuss getting the vaccine on a risk/benefit basis when 1) Dr Fauci is publicly executed and 2) the lockdowns receive Holocaust-level treatment in broader society. Til then, don’t care, my stance is that the chink virus isn’t real, was never real, and is just the government killing people and lying about the cause as an excuse to take away our freedom.
You've been warned about this before. Racial slurs are allowed if there is actually a point you're trying to make with them, but just dropping them as edgy emphasis to see how many jammies you can rustle is not.
There is a point I'm making with it- lots of people saw the virus reaction as pure overblown neuroticism to take away our freedom and make us into a communist country. These people calling it the 'chink virus' with 'panic mongering gay morning america propaganda' are far more representative of the median virus skeptic than motteizeans.
I remember my dad using those words to describe the narrative which, in his telling, was evidence against the nineteenth amendment due to its effect on women in march or april of 2020. This did not get much disagreement in the room- whether pro-Trump or anti-Trump(and there are anti-Trump Arklatex rednecks, or at least were), rich or poor, young or old. The view that people who actually gave a shit about a new and exciting form of the common cold(and that the deaths were mostly at the very least miscoded) because it was from China were a prime example of how stupid people voting is a prime danger to free people everywhere is what I had in mind. Perhaps my experiences and dialectical forms are unfamiliar to the motte.
Arklatex sounds like software for reverting typeset math into bad handwriting.
It's a name for a region encompassing deep east Texas as well as parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
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The sentiment is one I see a lot of, even if not the specific word 'chink'. Open slurs are very much a hallmark of the edgy, online right, in my experience. Normie Republicans like my own (grand)parents think slurs are rude, but they're comfortable with the ideas they encompass -- the kung-flu is absolutely the fake and gay China virus pushed by the elites to cull the population, but you don't call it the chink virus.
This is probably a cultural difference- Arklatex rednecks are comfortable using the word nigger, assuming it isn't just a generic term for black but rather for those who warrant it due to bad behavior(this can be very, very broad, to the point of encompassing normal in black tribe actions which are simply seen as tasteless, like listening to rap music or having sagging pants). The idea that a non-white race can be another strike against an individual, but not enough to condemn a person by itself, is just in the groundwater.
I've heard nigger come from my mother's lips a few times over the years, when she was very upset with some criminal banditry, but I got the impression she thinks it's a word she shouldn't say. That's the sort of racism I'm used to from normie Republicans -- they feel guilty over it when it comes out, but it comes out when it's justified. Wouldn't call all blacks niggers, but might call a specific shitty black person a nigger.
I'd love to meet some Arklatex rednecks, though! I appreciate a people that don't bite their tongues for no good reason.
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I don't think it's anywhere near a open and shut case that the vaccines stopped the pandemic, we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against, but as people got vaccinated we also saw the rise of less deadly variants. And of course, as more people still got infected they would build natural immunity. As for the prevalence of side effects, again we don't have much information to compare against, but the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines. There was no scientific curiosity, anyone trying to raise any alarms was not taken with even a slight grain of seriousness but immediately the public health establishments were looking for ways to discredit them. While that does not increase the trustworthiness of those making the claims, it does negatively affect the trustworthiness of those dismissing them without even looking at them.
Note, I'm not saying that the vaccines did nothing but caused deadly side effects, personally I think it probably had a mild effect in lowering the seriousness of infection for people who encountered COVID for the first time after the vaccine, and was probably generally safe and side effects no more prevalent or serious than other similar drugs, but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this, so I wouldn't judge someone for coming to a different conclusion.
No, but we have a counterfactual population to compare against, the population who chose not to get vaccinated. The comparison is gigantic and unambiguous, vaccines saved lives. And that's with the unvaccinated population benefitting from the partial herd immunity provided by the vaccinated population.
If they weren't being honest about side effects, why did you quote an article about them describing side effects and how common they are as a reason for not getting the vaccine? How does that not count as honesty?
If that were true, they would have just released the vaccines instead of spending months and months doing exhaustive trials to see whether and to what extent the vaccines reduced infection, and what side effects there were. If scientific curiosity means anything, it means testing your hypotheses with studies. What exactly did you expect them to do beyond that?
You have a massive population of vaccinated people, living among a massive population of unvaccinated people. The unvaccinated population had death rates from COVID that an order of magnitude higher than the vaccinated population. What more evidence could you ask for?
It's very simple: when the pro-vaccine side began censoring, they lost all credibility. I don't care what these alleged studies say. I assume they're poisoned and discard them, because the people publishing them used the state to censor anything contrary.
There is nothing they can say to me that would prompt me to read their work much less change my mind on the vaccine
It's pretty fallacious to split the entire species into 'the pro-vaccine side' and 'the anti-vaccine side' and conclude that because some people or organisations were censoring information (as if this is a new thing for organisations to do) then you can ignore all studies and evidence (and your own lying eyes) about whether the covid vaccines worked.
Germany censors people who think the Holocaust didn't happen. That doesn't mean the Holocaust deniers are right.
Paul Graham says to keep your identity small, and this is a perfect example why. You're wilfully putting yourself at risk for a disease because your political partisanship won't allow you to accept a medical technology that your political opponents might like.
What risk? AFAIK if you're not 80 or diabetic, covid is a trivial inconvenience.
Contracting and then passing on COVID to my older immuno-suppressed relatives, for whom the vaccine doesn't provide 100% protection. And since the way we ultimately defeated the virus was by achieving herd immunity, me getting a vaccine contributes to that, rather than free-riding as anti-vaxxers did.
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I have bad news for you.
I have literally personally spoken to a Holocaust survivor who was in a death camp as a girl. I believe her (and the entirety of the historical field) over internet jew-haters.
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Actually, official censorship of Holocaust revisionism is a good reason to suspect that the official narrative is flawed in some way. That's how censorship works: censors lose any credible claim to the intellectual high ground.
Holocaust denial censorship is best understood as part and parcel of bans on Nazi symbols. Holocaust deniers aren't disinterested historians searching for truth. They're Jew-haters who are threatened by the idea of a genocide of Jews because it undermines their beliefs that Jews rule the world.
Fortunately, I live in a country which bans neither Holocaust denial (our vibrant Muslim underclass are very grateful) nor Nazi symbolism. The Holocaust deniers have failed to win in the free marketplace of ideas because they are wrong (and motivated by transparent ethnic animosity), not because the government won't let them post on the internet.
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If you separate the pro-vaccine people from the prestige of their institutions -- the ones which were doing the censoring -- for what reason is there to give them any credibility?
Who are 'the pro-vaccine people', every government and health authority in the developed world? The supermajority of people on the planet who willingly got a vaccine? Humanity is not in a manichean struggle between pro- and anti-vax. Vaccines are just a (very) useful medical technology that unfortunately got tied up with the toxic partisanship and negative polarisation of American politics.
In the less angry parts of the world, we just got our jabs and got on with life once the virus went away because of them.
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Ah yes, the trials where they hand picked the population to be tested by specifically excluding mothers and other groups most likely to confirm side effects, the same trials which stink to high heaven where they just went, welp some of the time has passed time to fold the control group into the main group and pretend everything is fine. These same MFers which to this very day are trying to keep the heart damage side effects frequency unkown to the general public.
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