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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?

I think in such a hypothetical, the whole political climate of 21st century neo-neoliberalism will be fundamentally altered. There would be a huge rightward shift on distrust to authorities, especially but not limited to scientists and public health authorities. I don’t think the public would be satisfied with Fauci and other heads being tried, and will demand sentences for the thousands of individuals involved in the decision similar to what we would see in the Nuremberg trials. This would also fundamentally change the political climate, as the “vax-maxxed” lean left.

Excuse me for laughing here, but the whole discourse around the vaccine(s) and health risks now showing up is just an impossible situation. People have been complaining that the FDA were foot-dragging on useful drugs and that we were all grown-up adults who could evaluate the risks for ourselves and if a drug was risky, let us take the risk. Then the vaccines were pushed through fast and everyone said this was good and sensible and should be the way things work.

And now there are complaints of "too fast! too risky! not enough tests! Big Pharma only interested in profits! The experts should have held up the process until it was all accounted for!"

So do we want fast but risky, or slow but sure, and whatever decision happened, there would be criticism about the effects on the health of the general public (e.g. if the vaccines had been trialled the usual way, "millions will die that could be avoided by simple vaccination programme, vaccination is a long-established practice that has been proven to be safe, what is the hold-up?")

I'm not saying The Experts were flawless, but the public is fickle.

If only there had been honesty about the vaccine is not approved but early signs seem good and it's available for those who wish to take it. Clear emergency use authorizations seem like a great way for the FDA to allow some risky products out early while keeping highly risk averse testing required for full approval.

If they had actually tested it swiftly and effectively, I'd have fewer problems with it.

They developed the vaccine in April, then they were testing it all the way to November. But the actual testing they did was with extremely small sample sizes, against early versions of COVID. How could they have discovered the heart condition issue with a few hundred people? And they had to be aware that the virus was mutating, that every day they waited the effectiveness of their vaccine was declining. So we get a semi-obsolete vaccine with moderately severe side effects. This is not a good outcome.

I would've preferred if they tested quickly and effectively, vaccinating people and then infecting them with COVID in human challenge trials. I'm confident you could get tens of thousands of volunteers if you offered a cash payment. Or put 0.1% of the media firepower devoted to fear campaigns and demonizing people who go outside into praising the brave volunteers. Large sample sizes would let you find the heart issues as opposed to discovering them after mass vaccination had begun, when it was too late to turn back without extreme embarrassment.

The vaccines weren't pushed through fast and they weren't adequately tested. Then they were mandated anyway, including for those who face very little risk from COVID like young people with no comorbidities like obesity or lung conditions.

They developed the vaccine in April

February. (For the sake of accuracy; this makes your conclusions stronger, not weaker.)

It's easy to imagine minds legitimately too constrained to think as far outside the box as "human challenge trials"... if only I was sure that was the problem. It would be easier to forgive the use of mindless bureaucratic "we have to follow trial protocol!" to replace thinking if they'd actually mindlessly followed protocol, rather than changing it after the fact to totally-coincidentally delay trial results until after the election. If we could easily change study design after all, post facto with hand-waved justification, it becomes much harder to justify making changes that added delays and let thousands more die instead of changes that removed delays.

I was actually thinking of Pfizer which started trials in April but your point stands - Feb for Moderna. I suppose it was too broad and an oversimplification to talk about 'the vaccine' when there were several.

The delay issue is also very serious, I agree.

Moderna had a sample size of 30K for their phase 3 testing. Not sure where you got the few hundred number….

https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download

The sample size for Moderna's trial was 30K, 15K actually got the vaccine and of those, only 800 caught COVID. And how long did this process take? It took until November, during which the vaccine was getting less effective and people were dying en masse. They had only 30 cases of severe COVID in the whole test.

Gotcha that makes more sense. I agree the FDA should be more open about experimental treatments being an option.

I think part of it is just a large group of people are contrarian against whatever the mainstream is pushing. If Pfizer and the CDC were pushing ivermectin hard and MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

An interesting thought experiment is if the vaccine came out 5 months sooner Trump would have taken credit and pushed it all day every day to try and win the election. Could easily see a scenario where the anti vax and pro vax camps flip among the hardcore partisans.

MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

I mean, it's possible, but to hear Brett himself say it, he's reasoning from first principles that we simply do not understand the complex system that is our immune response well enough to make the very first MRNA vaccine ever mandatory for as much of the population as possible. He talked to a lot of people discussing vaccine side effects, and while I think he may have been taken in by some hustlers or alarmist early on, I think his assessment that the risk of myocarditis among the young male cohort easily overshadows the pitiful protections the "vaccine" offers is reasonable. Seems to even be the consensus position of most nations not dominated by Phizer ad dollars. He also recently picked up on igg4 discussion related to the MRNA vaccine, and I guess we'll see how that turns out.

Personally I've had pain in the ass tinnitus since I got the jab, and am fairly bitter since it was mandatory for me to keep my job, and keep my family warm with full bellies.

If Pfizer and the CDC were pushing ivermectin hard and MRNA vaccines were still under review the Brett Weinstein’s of the world would be clamoring for MRNA and crying conspiracy.

What do you base this on? Weinstein seemed pretty reasonable to me, although I haven't heard from him in a while.

I may be overly cynical but I think Weinstein saw a big opening to get a following by going against the vax (he’d already had similar success going against academia) and he ran with it to great success.

He could sound very reasonable by preaching a pro vaccine message as well but then he’d just be another fish in the mainstream media sea.

I have yet to hear him say something that didn't seem like an extrapolation of classical liberal principles. What he said about both academic insanity and the handling of the vaccine are that. Have you? Because it seems like you are overly partisan rather than cynical if 'he speaks out based on his principles' didn't occur to you - you view him as an enemy, so only vices like greed and conceit drive him, not principles.

Why would I view Brett as the enemy? He’s just another talking head. I think he’s acting to build and engage with an audience. This is the same incentive structure as the rest of the media.

There was clearly an unmet market for a contrarian take on the vaccine and Brett jumped whole heart into it.

Just because someone has a different take than Maddow and Hannity doesn’t mean they don’t have the same incentives.

Dude, he has a middling youtube channel (not even half a million subscribers!) and he goes on podcasts and you classify him as media - like Hannity or Maddow - to justify your dislike of him. Despite having no evidence he has espoused non classical liberal values, let alone that he's just being contrarian.

You have nothing to base your original claim on, so the conclusion I reach is that you either view him as the enemy and think he must be motivated by vice or don't understand classical liberals and think we are all lying about our principles. We're not. Bret Weinstein is a dork, but he's a dork with principles.

I'm OK with allowing people to take the experimental vaccine for themselves.

I'm not OK with governors requiring it for state employees, or healthcare workers. I'm not OK with the President requiring it for federal employees. I'm not OK with coercion, nudging, and other propaganda in favor of the experimental vaccine.

The messaging should have always been, "this is an experimental vaccine whose safety we cannot guarantee long term." That was never the messaging, and in fact every authoritative message I've seen is pretty much exactly the opposite.

The public is, unsurprisingly, vast and contains multitudes.

I think the bulk of criticism is coming from never-vaxxers justifying their own stances rather than regrets from those who complied. In the mainstream, political affiliation is quite predictive of whether someone will excoriate the FDA. Honestly, that’s probably true here, too; people are just more likely to dig up actual evidence for whatever stance they picked back in 2020.

If Scott flips and says “maybe I shouldn’t have been a principled libertarian, just this once,” then I’ll be worried.

I honestly think whatever the FDA did, someone would complain. It's been three years and counting now, and Covid outbreaks and new variants are still flaring up. I think if the various world governments had not taken the path they did, there would be articles and social media posts about "if only the government had made vaccination mandatory for groups X, Y and Z, we'd have beaten the virus and it wouldn't still be a problem now!"

Nobody has a crystal ball, that's the problem. What would have worked, could have worked, might have been - nobody knows.

I do agree there was a lot of heavy-handed and contradictory messaging - the whole "no you can't go to church, you will spread a deadly virus but yes you can protest in the streets because racism is more of a threat than the deadly virus" shilly-shallying, for one.

we were all grown-up adults who could evaluate the risks for ourselves and if a drug was risky, let us take the risk

A vital part of the FDA being less cautious about approvals is that I be allowed to exercise my own caution. Letting the FDA take bigger risks on approvals and then mandating I take the approved drug is not allowing me to evaluate risks for myself.

The discourse is a product of the fact that people are starved for allowable avenues to express their suspicion about the political structure. Americans are using prompts in favor of eugenics and great replacement as a benchmark to see if their chatbots are well-aligned and truthful, they have built entire secular religions around racial grievances and are prohibited from recognizing them for what they are; these people are in a pretty bad place mentally.

Vaccine skepticism is, despite the best efforts of team progressive, very fitting with the general spirit of classical liberalism – my body my choice, the Man is holding the little men down, I'm entitled to believe whatever dumb bullshit I want, you don't get to dictate my epistemology – while satisfying the «elites are poisoning my precious bodily fluids» gut feeling prevalent among the growing fringe.

Just like Q (are we finally really over that psyop?), its proliferation is another discrediting self-own.

So in your opinion vaccine skepticism (specifically Covid vaccine skepticism) has the same truth value as a lunatic fringe theory like QAnon? That's certainly not a very nuanced position, even if you dressed it up in 3 paragraphs of text.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the Covid vaccines, and the skepticism is certainly not a uniquely American phenomenon.

Early on I was swayed by more by my more libertarian friends saying "Hey, the FDA has always been way too cautious, it is dumb to worry that they were excessively swayed by the drug companies or were overly hasty in approving the vaccine, if they approve it, it must be pretty good."

Now I think that the FDA (and even more so, the CDC) is just bad its job, so sometimes it will be way too conservative in blocking experimental medicine, and other times way too hasty and gung-ho about approving medicine that does not really show a good cost-benefit ratio. If the FDA was good at its job it would be requiring a large, randomized control study of the MRNA shots that would be ongoing, that would look at both efficacy and overall mortality.

One thing I did not appreciate is how easily FDA "approval" turns into private mandates. A lot of people and institutions in our society are simply deferring to the FDA and CDC for judgement so if they approve it that is there signal to mandate it. I read the data about the covid jab in kids and it seemed like the cost-benefit was decidedly negative. That said, I was fine if the FDA wanted to allow parents who thought it might work for their particular kid to obtain it. And even when they approved it some of the officials said that they don't recommend that every kid just blindly get it. But then the CDC issued a recommendation, and then camps and classes I want my kids to attend started requiring the jab. There was simply no space for personal choice either way, no space for approved for those who wanted it, but not mandated.

It would be nice if there was a publicly acknowledged FDA stamp of "might work, use at your own risk but we don't recommend it." I guess that is what emergency use authorization was supposed to be. But somehow that is not what has happened.

The whole vaccine rollout had the theme of "all that is not compulsory is forbidden." That is: adults were banned from taking vaccines until the FDA had satisfactorily hemmed and hawed over the trials; afterward, vaccines became compulsory for quite a lot of everyday activities. This was similar (though more dramatic) story as masks-- masks were heavily discouraged by the CDC right up to the point where the CDC began mandating them.

In general the FDA and CDC are really really bad at expressing any epistemic attitude that isn't "utter certainty", even in the frequent occasions that the info available doesn't justify certainty.

For that reason I think it's basically coherent to say that the FDA was too restrictive and too pushy about the vaccines.

EDIT: This was also true of boosters! Boosters were forbidden roughly until the FDA began mandating them in order to be "fully vaccinated".

That is: adults were banned from taking vaccines until the FDA had satisfactorily hemmed and hawed over the trials

Entities were banned from testing people for COVID-19 while the CDC spent weeks coming up with and distributing their own, broken test mechanisms.

Good times.

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