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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.
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.
No one has ever disputed some jews were in some camps. As with the rona, the more they censor the discussion of the subject and related accepted narratives, the more I am inclined to disbelieve them.
Who exactly is 'they' here?
The survivors, the soldiers who liberated the camps and the historians who studied the Holocaust afterwards are not the ones doing the censoring. Governments (and not most governments) censor Holocaust denial because they know that the only people who question the historical facts do so because they hate Jews, and hating Jews caused the Nazis to kill six million of them. We can argue whether censorship is the right approach or not, but its mere existence isn't evidence that the Holocaust was exaggerated or made up. To believe otherwise fails in the same way that all true conspiracy theories fail, it requires too much coordination from too many people over too long.
You don't need to know who is pushing something to notice it's being pushed. There are empirically false claims made about the Holocaust; some of them have even been publicly recognized as false (such as inflated estimates of camp populations). The problem is that all the most scandalous and lurid nonsense gets shared, and becomes common knowledge, even though it's totally bogus. There is a machine that vigorously defends the Holocaust -- both its truths and its myths.
And for the record, memory is notoriously fickle -- a child's even moreso. Trusting the field of history is fine, but you should probably not trust the survivor's testimony too much, especially this long after the events in question.
If you're positing a worldwide, decades long conspiracy to fabricate or exaggerate a genocide that never happened, then yes you need to actually say who (specifically) is pushing it and how they are doing so. Otherwise all you're doing is noticing that millions of eyewitnesses and all serious historians agree that the Holocaust happened, and that many government censor its denial, without actually demonstrating the conspiracy you're positing.
Do you think that she is mistaken about the part where they shot her mother in the head? Or the part where she came to live in London because her dozens-strong family back on the continent were all dead?
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