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If they're so smart, why did they fall for the psy-op?
I can see smart teenagers fall for it because they're too busy to study to go online and 'do their own research' which has been the easiest thing in history since circa 2005.
Anyone with a certain brain processing power that has lived in the Western world for 20+ years has no excuse.
Weren't you around for the Iraq WMD or any of these dozens of disasters resulting from trusting government and corporations?
For what--disagreeing with your take?
The point you're making here can be made without the consensus-building language, so please avoid that in the future.
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Decision making and instrumental intelligence aren't connected for everybody. Most people don't make decisions based on thinking, they are followers of one kind or another. They follow traditional rules, or what the boss tells them, or their priest tells them, or they mimic what the people right next to them are doing. This is totally normal and probably essential for society or any kind of human organization to work.
But those people can still be smart. Even if they will never have an independent thought about what they should do, they could still be incredibly talented scientists or technicians. And we want those people. If you were the boss, you would want smart followers. It's stupid to say "why would we care if a bunch of instrumentally smart people died because they were told to walk off a bridge" - we should care because they have useful skills to put to work. We should try to stop their leaders from telling them to walk off bridges.
I don't think it would even be good to live in a world were everyone thought deeply about what they should do. Such a society would probably be incapable of cooperation at scale.
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If you pose a hypothetical about the vaccine killing 25% of the vaccinated, you can't then use your hypothetical evidence to dunk on people for falling for a "psy-op".
It's plausible that the vaccine kills and maims some number of people, but reduces number of people killed and maimed by a larger number. Then it's rational to take the vaccine. But people weren't even working on that much information at the time, and it's a much harder problem.
The person you're responding to is so deep in their own fantasy scenario that they're already rolling out the gotchyas for something that they just straight made up lol.
"Let's assume a hypothetical scenario in which all smart people just punch themselves in the face once a day. Well if they're so smart, how come they keep punching themselves in the face once a day? Riddle me that, ace, riddle me that!"
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If we discuss reality? Because vaccine was better than no vaccine.
For not taking vaccine.
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What is your exact definition of the psy-op, here?
That young people had a need to turn themselves into GMO experiment.
-injections do not protect from getting the disease
-have negative side effects in a % of the pop, including fertility (imaging wanting children in the future and submitting to a potentially sterilizing procedure)
-below a certain age the disease itself is basically not deadly
-governments prevented travel from pure humans but that's over
-colleges prevented attending but that's on the way out
-some companies prevented holding a job, probably over and plenty of companies did not
In summary, injection was unnecessary, harmful to health, and not taking it relatively easy to avoid for presumably smart people
mRNA vaccines do not modify your genome. They trick your body into turning genes they carry into spike proteins, just like the virus does, but they don't replace your genes, and they don't make more of their own genes to repeat the process at exponentially-increasing scales like the virus does.
This stuff isn't as clearly against the rules as the "anyone with a certain brain processing power" above, but it is a good time for "proactively provide evidence" to come to mind.
They had better than 90% protection from disease in the first RCT. That dropped with time and with new variants, but even if it had had zero lasting protection, the temporary protection still would have been worth taking a chance for by vulnerable populations in the first megadeath-scale waves.
This is trivially true because "ow my arm" is a negative side effect, but for any serious claim you'll need specific side effects and numeric percentages. It didn't have as many negative side effects as getting Covid-19 one extra time. The trouble with trying to avoid risk here is that Covid's spread was so extensive that there was no way to avoid risk. There was just "risk exposing your body to a carefully metered dose of Covid spikes" versus "risk exposing your body, with your immune system unprepared, to an exponentially reproducing dose of Covid viruses".
And this is at least true because zero is a percent?
This is an especially weird one for me, because actual testosterone decline has been going on for 50 years, sperm quality included, with no complete explanations, and even the incomplete explanations don't seem to be engendering much concern from anyone. If one side of the Culture War wants to go all Buck Turgidson, couldn't we at least get some good out of it, and focus on an actual measurable corruption of our precious bodily fluids?
This is true or false depending on your definition of "basically" and "a certain age"; risks did rise pretty much exponentially with age, but there were still a few hundred pediatric deaths and tens of thousands of hospitalizations in the US. If you look at excess death counts Covid starts clearly showing up in the 25-44 age group; not kids, but not exactly great-grandma either.
This is all true (and more: some companies were forced to prevent holding a job, to remain federal contractors), and in hindsight (or maybe with foresight, from anyone who didn't see any a priori reason to expect long-lived sterilizing immunity against a disease not obviously more static than influenza) it was questionable to bar people even temporarily from half of society under the desperate belief that this was going to be the final step to push R below 1 for good.
The Reuters 'fact-checker' quotes Mark Lynas who is merely speculating:
"It does not enter the (cell) nucleus and cannot interact with your DNA or cause any changes to the genome (here)”.
Then this other source:
'In an explainer about COVID-19 vaccines, Oxford University’s Vaccine Knowledge Project rebukes misinformation about mRNA with equal force: “there is no way for human DNA to be altered by an mRNA vaccine.” (here).'
They are asserting this claim without evidence.
Until this is actually tested, it is possible.
Here's a few contradicting evidences :
Basically it is established that RNA can be turned into DNA and integrated into the genome.
This is a well-known phenomenon.
The point of contention is whether or not what is in the injection can do the same thing.
Until there is a study coming out to prove in a large sample that this does not happen, it remains a possibility, no matter what fact-checkers say, as this is something that happens in nature.
Here's one in-vitro study that found DNA integration of the injection product
Here is the commentary on that study that says 'vaccines are safe but actually that study makes a good point'
The mechanism exists in nature but we need to know whether or not it happens in injected humans.
Issues have to do with whether or not the injection reaches the cell nucleus, and whether or not the RNA gets reverse-transcribed, and what dose is needed, etc.
The FDA itself did not have even specify an actual dose on its emergency authorization if I recall correctly.
They are not controlling how much of the RNA mixture each injection delivers, as far as I know.
Here's one of your previous Fact-chunkers describing some of the side effects.
Regarding fertility, I'm basing it on the widely reported complaints about menstruation issues from women who were injected and some other anecdotes.
Even if it did not make one sterile, it still would not make sense for young people to take it.
A lot of unhealthy people in that age range that could use some more obvious remedies before dipping into transhumanism; for example watching their diet or avoiding paraphilia associated with sexually-transmitted diseases.
Interesting how pendulum swings. 2 years ago Job's posts would be much better received. I do agree that the vaccines are likely not dangerous, but they do not stop spread of Covid either, and experts oversold efficacy of stopping covid.
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But there are key differences between the injection and an infection.
If I get infected, I'm getting a few particles as part of a spray.
Where do these particles come from? Well they were built by a virus infecting another person, so if that virus contained RNA sequences that turned the host cell cancerous and unable to produce more viruses, it probably would not be able to produce more particles to infect me.
What is the dose I get? Probably something proportional to the amount of air I'm able to breathe.
If I'm a large guy, I'm probably inhaling a lot of air all at once, so more of these particles.
If I'm more pocket-sized, I would guess that I'm not inhaling as much of the virus at once.
I don't know how many of them there are, but they are diluted among other stuff in the particle itself, in the air, into my mucosa, my mucus. Right there and then my immune system starts taking charge of some of them.
My nose, my mouth, my mucosa were created by God to expect such aggression.
It's business as usual.
Then some of these particles manage to actually infect cells and the virus manages to replicate itself yadda yadda.
All in my nose, in my mucosa, maybe slightly deeper in my lungs, idk the details of covid infection.
If I get injected, I get a certain amount of liquid (few ml) at a certain rather uniform concentration all in the same spot. Not a spray.
What is the dose I get? The dose that Pfizer/Moderna decided to put in the bottle.
Supposedly the same dose for everybody. So presumably a dose containing enough material to 'work' for people that are 300 lbs or over.
This is all going straight into the fat of my arm, or if the remaining medical staff that fell for the psy-op and didn't quit due to vaccine mandates messed up, straight into my blood.
The material is coming from a factory, where products are sometimes defective, processes can go wrong, quality controls can be overlooked, concentrations can vary, effectiveness, quality, purity of the material might be compromised.
That is if the owners of the factory are not purposefully committed to making poison.
Was the fat of my arm or my blood stream made by God to receive a dose of RNA? No.
Is this expected by my immune system? No.
We are talking about different tissues, different cell types. Different doses. Chemically different substances. Different modes of administration.
The virus never came out and say that cutting boys' peepees will turn them female, unlike all the doctors pushing the vaccine.
Some people have even called the virus racist, it's hard not to sympathize.
no, cells in your body are hijacked to produce endless copies of virus
if you are infected it is not going to be "few particles"
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Try "lungs, upper respiratory tract, heart, brain, liver, intestines, kidneys, gonads, adrenals, really anything that expresses ACE2".
Is this what it is? A naturalistic fallacy justified by religion?
In any case, the body is in fact pretty equipped to deal with weird rogue RNA, so much so that an mRNA vaccine would need to be made to be less detectable to the immune system so it can work! So you're even right on this point, even if only by complete chance!
And in any case, you can probably just opt to take a non-Pfizer/Moderna vaccine? There is Novavax, after all. You'd want to steer clear of J&J and Astrazeneca as well, since those are vector vaccines.
My argument is that Covid infection and the injections are singularly different things, if the material is genetically-modified, because all kind of things can happen during the production of the genetic material.
When I'll be 60 I'll start considering vaccines for things like the flu or covid. Or maybe not.
God gave us beautiful bodies with a immune system, no need for genetically-modified constructs to deal with a glorified cold.
If I were at substantial risk of dying and leaving orphans, I'd consider possibly taking the risk of buying what the merchants are selling.
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Retroviruses like HIV are able to insert their genomes into the human genome because they're built to do so.
COVID is not built to do so. It does not code for the requisite protein for reverse transcription, nor does it code for other vital components like the pre-integration complex, which...integrates the new DNA into the host genome.
The mRNA vaccine, which codes only for one surface protein of the virus that already doesn't have the machinery for DNA integration, naturally does not have the requisite protein for reverse transcription, or for its integration into the genome.
Even if it was from a retrovirus, stripping away the components that integrate it into the genome - i.e. isolating only one surface protein from the entire viral genome - would make the vaccine unable to 1) reverse transcribe that into DNA, and 2) integrate it into the host genome. It is not built to integrate into the host genome.
Even if you were able to integrate it into the host genome, what would you expect to happen? You'd have a stranded bit of coding sequence inserted into a genome essentially randomly without a promoter, coding for a surface protein that doesn't really do anything alone in the context of the human cell. The splicing might randomly impact the cell via accidentally inserting itself into a coding sequence, or an intron, or a promoter sequence, or it might integrate into a region of noncoding RNA where it might affect some of the local molecular architecture.
It would be a really, really stupid way of trying to genetically engineer a population, because it actively wouldn't work on so many different levels.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Yes, so what you are saying is that there are a bunch of HIV+ people walking around with reverse transcriptases in some of their cells.
What do reverse transcriptases do? They transcribe RNA into DNA.
They don't care if it's HIV or covid.
If I was masterminding a big conspiracy to sterilize a big part of humanity, this is the part I would be lying about.
Not saying that this is true or not, I'm just saying one possibility is that it is actually packaged in there and nobody has the capacity or will to check.
Heck, they could have been injecting us with reverse transcriptase in a separate instance (food, drinks, other injections), but that's a little bit too convoluted.
That's the fun experiment part.
Do this to billions of people and a few hundred thousands of them will have a few cells where the spike protein sequence just happens to insert itself in the right area to get translated into a functional protein. And some other hundred thousands will have sequences that do not generate a functional protein, but instead generate something like a prion protein, or turns the cell into a cancerous cell, which would be much worse. And some other thousands or millions will have some other kind of integration that just kills the cell instead and stops the issue...
Well maybe this was all a big test and it failed. Maybe they genuinely tried to engineer something functional to save humanity and they just screwed up big time and then they just kept doubling down on, covering their traces because of the stakes, the outrage, the money, and business as usual with Big Pharma and the people that are loyal to it.
So you're positing that the government is doing a massive psyop to...do untold things only to people with an active retrovirus infection (e.g. people with low HIV viral load wouldn't be nearly as susceptible), which might not even work because mRNA vaccines aren't actually using normal nucleosides but instead synthetic, modified nucleosides?
Wouldn't patients with an active HIV infection have, you know, more things to be concerned about, like their active HIV infection?
(Whether they would work would be an open question, but I could - with no knowledge of these particular nucleoside analogues - just as/even more convincingly say that it's protective against genome insertion especially compared to an actual infection, since after all, nucleoside analogues are exactly one of the ways we treat HIV via blocking reverse transcription!)
If they're lying about this, they could be lying about anything, couldn't they? HIV could actually not be a retrovirus and be some sort of coordinated poisoning of homosexuals that accidentally leaked to the heterosexual population. COVID could actually be a retrovirus (despite all 30k bp of the virus being public knowledge), and using an mRNA vaccine with is actually protective because we're reducing the chance of viral integration into the genome!
Especially since the sequences used for the vaccines are public knowledge for ages now! And when international labs sequenced it, they did find something interesting...just not about this particular conspiracy, but the lab leak one!
(Or maybe the entire world's labs are just in on one giant joke?)
As an aside, food and drink would be extremely implausible. It would have to survive heat and cold and digestion, unless you're alleging that government agents are clandestinely spraying synthetic viruses onto masses of foodstuff just before they're served.
And people would do this in such an obviously stupid way...why? If you wanted to run stupid experiments that are essentially the equivalent of throwing tomatoes into a shredder and seeing if one tomato manages to reconstitute itself perfectly as it falls, you could...use lab animals!
It would also depend on what integration mechanism is used. Retroviral integrases and integration complexes usually preferentially bind to sites of high transcription...which would suggest that you'd have a permanent transcription of spike protein sitting there waiting to be degraded and not doing much else.
If instead your aim was to do the maximum evulz, this is again an extremely expensive and inefficient way to do it, given that most people wouldn't even be susceptible!
(That wouldn't pass any sort of ethics committee, but neither would the human version you're suggesting, so what gives?)
The point is that, based on very public knowledge about the vaccine verified by many parties throughout the world, this was very obviously not something meant to gene edit the majority of humanity in any way for any benign or nefarious purpose.
Practically the entire world would have to be lying about the vaccine for this to work, including China, which explicitly has been pushing Sinovac to the exclusion of the mRNA vaccines despite its lower efficacy!
There are concerns regarding such a new technology first applied to humans, true. Some of it even makes sense (e.g. overlapping ORFs being a theoretical risk)! But none of it even remotely approaches what you're alleging.
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From wikipedia- "SARS‑CoV‑2 is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus[14] that is contagious in humans.[15]". Specifically, it enters your cell, expresses a RNA dependent RNA polymerase to copy its RNA, and then the RNA is translated into proteins that, with the genome, form new RNA viruses that go on to infect more cells. This means that, like the vaccines, covid itself puts RNA into your cells to replicate itself. So that doesn't make the vaccine any worse than covid. Or any one of the hundreds of respiratory viruses that float around, hundreds of which you've been infected with. And the RNA itself from the vaccine is just a (slightly modified) spike protein RNA from the original coronavirus.
By this standard, plenty of previous vaccines are gene therapy - weakened live virus, adenovirus vector, etc.
Yeah, lots of viruses do this. Covid is much less likely to, because it doesn't have DNA as part of its lifecycle, and doesn't encode a reverse transcriptase to make more viral DNA.
this is just a case of 'not understanding what you are talking about'.
Not that I claim to fully understand what I'm talking about (IANAB), but IIRC the difference is that a COVID infection specifically targets a subset of cell-types in your respiratory system -- the vaccine is in your blood and spreads all over the place, entering many types of cells and causing them to produce spike protein.
This seems like quite a different mechanism -- doesn't mean it's not safe, but it introduces a number of unknowns.
Sure, but AIUI it can only replicate in cells with ACE-2 receptors -- which is different from the mRNA vaccines, right?
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The vaccine, afaik, doesn't 'go into your blood', but mostly stays in the muscle or the lymphatic system. And anyway, that concern also applies to most other vaccines.
Understanding the effects of vaccines, and pharmaceutical products generally, depends a lot on experiments and measurement - biology is really complex and one can't be confident in anything without testing. A vaccine or pharmaceutical that, 'in theory', should work great will often not, or have significant side effects, and a lot of knowledge has been built up on testing for and avoiding them. So none of what's been written above proves covid vaccines are good - the process of creating them and testing them was much more complex, tremendous amounts of niche domain knowledge is required to create and ensure safety for a vaccine, and none of us have that - it just rebuts specific claims that they're harmful.
I mean for some value of 'mostly' -- but it's measurable all over the place:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210404123801/https://www.pmda.go.jp/drugs/2021/P20210212001/672212000_30300AMX00231_I100_1.pdf
(Japanese report is in Japanese, but the pharmokinetics tables on pgs 16-17 are in English; notable areas with high concentrations of the nanoparticles are the liver, adrenals, ovaries, and bone marrow)
Other vaccines don't cause your cells to produce viral subunits; this is the new part, which carries unknowns.
The first part is all true -- but it doesn't seem to add up to much of a rebuttal, given the novelty of the mRNA aspect.
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Well I had covid twice so far while some people took over 3 injections.
Obviously a natural infection of a certain dose of particles through the nose or mouth is not the same as an injection in the arm in terms of dose, immune response, affected tissues...
And these triple-shot people are still getting sick!
Covid doesn't have it but a lot of viruses do.
What happens when somebody that was previously infected with a virus gets the injection?
Another factor to consider is that enzyme are only catalyzing chemical reactions.
Technically, these chemical reactions can occur spontaneously without enzymes as well.
If for whatever reason the RNA is getting concentrated in a given cell, perhaps a certain amount of them can end up spontaneously turning into DNA and getting captured by the cell machinery and getting integrated into the genome.
Another option is that the RNA gets cut into pieces and ends up having inhibitory effects on certain parts of the genome, upregulating or downregulating proteins that are needed for a healthy body.
This could happen for some people and not others depending on their specific genome, or even depending on their microbiome.
There are so many possibilities on what can go wrong depending on the dose, depending on which cells might preferentially accumulate the RNA, depending on the specific genome of the injected, depending on infections from other viruses, depending on the strength of the immune system...
Again, this is for a virus that is more or less as harmful as the flu ie not very.
What I need, instead of 'fact-checking' by 'experts' with no physical, scientific evidence that for example 'RNA cannot integrate the genome', is studies.
Show me that after looking at the cellular, tissue level among hundreds or thousands of people that you could not find one cell producing spikes long after the injection. That you can't find one sample of tissue affected by long-term injection consequences.
Why do I have this standard?
Because the people demanding for 2 years that I take that unnecessary, cosmetic injection are the same that have been claiming that boys can turn into women by taking hormones and slicing themselves. The same people that claimed that Iraq had WMD. The same people that tell me that crime statistics are racist, etc, etc.
it is not at all obvious the latter is worse in some sense than the former. for one, the covid virus can replicate itself, while the mrna particles cannot
as has been stated hundreds of times, the vaccine clearly is not preventing transmission, probably for the same reason both 1.5^x and 8^x both increase with time. but it is effectively preventing death
... have you taken a high school biology class? "Technically, these chemical reactions can occur spontaneously without enzymes as well" ... not really, no. this is technically true if 'can occur spontaneously' has a rate of 10^-500/second or something.
As you note, normal viruses constantly integrate themselves into the genomes of your cells. It's an "intended" part of some of their lifecycles! And even if the mrna vaccine can do that, then ... so can covid. So why is the vaccine worse than covid?
It was significantly more harmful than the flu for older people, and everyone gets flu vaccines anyway
they also demand you wear seatbelts and not pour gasoline on the ground.
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Viruses replicate, in a way that the mRNA vaccine...doesn't? And goes into your bloodstream? And the receptor implicated in viral entry in COVID is expressed throughout the body.
Conversely, you get less systemic action (though still some) with the jab, because much of it stays pretty local to the injection site.
Most likely not very much, because:
Viral integrases are particular about what sequences they integrate, and...
A cell that is that actively translating viral reverse transcriptase is a cell that's...dying to the virus (if it wasn't being transcribed+translated and instead is in a provirus state, then there would be no issue), while a cell that is actively translating human reverse transcriptase is probably a cancer (or you're quite old, or it's differentiating, etc), and...
The mRNA vaccine might not even be readable, given that it isn't made with normal RNA nucleosides, and...
Even if it gets integrated it likely wouldn't do very much!
This is all talking about viral RTs; we humans have reverse transcriptase sequences in our genomes as well, from ancient retroviral infections (as you allude to). COVID itself possibly could be reverse transcribed into a small number of cell lines post-infection in a much less controlled manner, producing chimeric human-viral proteins. This would likely affect a small minority of people, and the actual health effects are pretty unclear.
Based on this, I would be much more worried about sequence integration post-infection compared to post-vaccine. At least you can engineer synthetic RNA-like molecules to be less recognisable by LINE1 retrotransposon RTs, and even if it happened, you can control the sequence being inserted.
It wouldn't just spontaneously turn into DNA. Reverse transcription is not a modification of the RNA sequence, it is a synthesis of new DNA strands based on the old one. Good luck doing that without an enzyme turning ATP into energy for that synthesis.
Have fun with that, biology is messy, and proving a negative is....well.
The spike protein could be produced if its sequence integrates into DNA.
What if there is so much RNA floating around that they just act in a more non-specific way?
Maybe. This is all about chemical logistics.
The assumption is that the mRNA is safe from integrating DNA because there is no reverse transcriptase packaged with it
turns out there could be cells containing reverse transcriptase but then the cells are probably dying so them getting spike DNA wouldn't matter
so we're assuming that the event won't happen because the enzyme and the RNA would not be together in the same cell
or that cell would not be producing spike protein for long
So it seems unlikely that we would have spike protein or some other type of foreign protein continuously produced after the injection. But then who knows what actually happens, until this is actually studied?
Did anybody test the same thing for injected people? That's what I'm asking for, before 'fact-checkers' assert that 'it's impossible'. Actually test it, then tell me whether it's possible or not. If one study finds no evidence of such a thing occurring in a large sample, it's better than a couple people hand-waving the issue away.
That seems correct. It seems that reverse transcriptase would be necessary for integration into DNA.
Not even making an attempt at providing evidence while simultaneously claiming something to be impossible is even worse. If it's impossible, at least produce evidence that you could not see it happen when you looked for it.
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It also says that the reason they're worried is because of a study showing SARS-CoV-2 itself doing the same thing. Personally I'd like to see both studies replicated first. (I recall one interdisciplinary-department joke: nobody believes a theoretical analysis except the ones who wrote it, everybody believes an experimental result except the ones who performed it) But let's assume it's a non-negligible chance for now. Would you think it's fair if I said that anyone exposed to Covid-19 (or to any virus, since we seem to be ignoring the retrovirus/non-retrovirus distinction) is now a GMO, not a "pure human"? If so, then what's the point? If not, then what's the difference?
Again, if only "just never get exposed to Covid-19 genes" was an option, that would have indeed been the non-risky option! That hasn't been an option since 2020 (maybe since January 2022? even the near-hermits were getting Omicron) and it may never be again.
30μg per 0.3mL injection is what's on the Pfizer fact sheet, but I guess for all we know they've just got a guy in a back alley who mixes .001g into one liter and 10g into the next? It would be weird that 90% of doses still worked in the trials, and 80% still worked well enough in the long run though, wouldn't it?
Although as an aside, this really is something I'd love to find out more about: has there been any testing of dose-response curves? If we could have gotten half the breakthroughs for 5% more side effects with a higher dose, or half the side effects for 0.5% more breakthroughs, but what we did instead was just run with the first educated guess that someone got into trials, just because the FDA doesn't like to see things vary without restarting long expensive trials from scratch, that could belong pretty high on the long list of things the FDA ought to be criticized for.
Obesity was another Covid risk factor, though IIRC if you compared "serious obesity" vs "an extra decade of age", the decade was worse for you. And I'd put "obesity epidemic" even above "testosterone decline" on my list of weird potentially-horrible population-spanning issues for which we should be hunting down systematic causes. But why stop at remedying two problems? If I diet and exercise and avoid STDs, that makes me less likely to die; if I diet and exercise and avoid STDs and avoid being virgin territory for a novel virus, that makes me even less likely to die.
They did it for the children dose I think. They still came out with more death on the injection side than what covid gives to children, but somehow that was not a concern.
The fact that there is a standard dose is somewhat concerning, or is it not?
According to this article, there is a standard dose.
Now let's ponder what it means that Moderna/Pfizer had to create a dose that would work just as well for the finest 300 lbs American citizen and the diminutive 150 lbs one.
Is the material just as likely to reach the key immune components necessary for whatever immune response is expected by the merchants in a much bigger body?
Would a bigger body necessitate a larger amount of material to reach the same response due to some unknown logistics?
Are the less-boldly-bodied people getting a larger dose than they would actually need? An excessive dose perhaps, that would perhaps concentrate the material into some cells, say the heart or some other critical tissue?
Yes.
You're asking these questions like this is the first vaccine ever proposed. We know the answers from several decades of experience developing vaccines. Dosage of vaccines is tiny and not weight-dependent because the immune system doesn't work that way. Dosage is smaller for children not because they are smaller but because their immune systems are less developed.
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Point of order, General Ripper was the one concerned about precious bodily fluids. Turgidson was concerned about people seeing the big board.
Other than that, excellent post.
Okay, I admit, it's been decades since I've seen the movie. In my defense, wasn't thinking "Turgid"-son was the "fluids" guy a natural mistake?
sounds like it's time for a rewatch, no?
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I'm not too worried about fertility for it's own sake; ceteris paribus I think a universe with more people is a better universe, but we've already made a decent start at that, and I'd be fine slowing down until we have fusion or at least economical widespread fission under our belts before we really go wild.
But shouldn't caring when a animal (including homo sapiens) population undergoes weird unexplained biological changes be the rule, not the exception? This is the sort of DDT-thinning-eggshells type of issue that you'd expect the environmentalist left to be jumping on, and instead it doesn't seem to even get the same level of urgent attention that a coal miner would give to a fainting canary. You don't even have to actually care about canaries (or human men) per se, you just have to be able to think about wider implications. By the time the lurking phalates or whatever the hell the problem is diffuse out of our homes and into the wider ecosystem, it may be too late to clean them up and save the snail darters or whatever directly-leftist-treasured species are next to be affected.
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After mentioning this issue (sperm and testosterone decline) twice in polite company... I've learned not to mention it in polite company. At least by remaining silent I don't trash my own personal chances of having children.
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Out of that list, the second one (negative side effects in a % of pop including fertility) remains unproven beyond a fairly small number of verified side-effects, the first and the third one are not necessarily among the reasons for taking the vaxx (even if the vaccine does not prevent one from getting the disease they might still want to mitigate effects and even if it's not deadly you might still want to mitigate otherwise a potentially nasty disease), and the rest (the ones about the mandates) have little do with one's intelligence, beyond that presumably intelligent people will have a larger probability of being in college or holding a high-paying job they can't afford to lose and would thus be under extra pressure to comply with the mandates, if the mandates even where the fundamental reason why they took the vaccine.
The disease is not particularly nasty for under-30s (under-50s IME) either -- hollowing out midwits who just do what they are told would probably be even more harmful to society than the removal of upper SDs of the IQ distribution though, so you are probably correct that this hypothetical conspiracy would be a self-own.
It wasn't nasty for our family, but I know several people who said that COVID was the worst flu they've ever had, or one of the worst. I also know one ~40-year-old guy who was put to the tubes and apparently came pretty close to kicking the bucket (he was triple-vaxxed, and very overweight). Even "nastiest flu you've ever had" might well sound like something that you might want to turn into a mid-strength flu, presuming the vaccine would help do that.
Sure, I've heard people say this too -- but "nastiest flu you've ever had" is... a thing that's gonna happen sometimes? Personally the flu (maybe 'RSV', idk) that I (and roughly everyone else I know) had a month ago or so was way worse than the COVID experience. Still not in the 'worst respiratory infection ever' ballpark, but, like -- shit happens.
Which doesn't seem to have worked out for your triple-vaxxed friend -- it's almost impossible at this point to separate the vaccine impact on severity from different variants, prior exposure, etc.
But that is why I said "under 30" -- I don't know any under-30s (vaxxed or not) who had worse than a moderate cold over it. "30s-40s + other risk factors" is definitely a group where the trade-off seemed tilted towards vaccination. (not sure anymore given that it's not really clear that the bivalent boosters are providing much improvement against current variants -- certainly not over a reasonable timeframe. I'd have to be pretty frail to consider boosting every ~3 months a good idea, considering cumulative side-effect risk and potential immune system weirdities)
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Yeah I was surprised by that too - especially because I didn't see utopia until we were in lockdown and my girlfriend suggested I check out the Australian series Utopia - a comedy series about working for the government - and because I couldn't get a legal copy I used the high seas and got the UK series. I brought it up a dozen or so times in gatherings, and even the people who had seen it didn't want to talk about it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if one of the cast or crew had been metooed or something before deciding it hit too close to home and made you look like a conspiracy theorist. Pretty good watch though.
Side note - the Australian Utopia series is also pretty good. What is less good is sitting down for a typical Australian sitcom mix of irony and stupidity and instead watching a Brit viciously beat people to death with a hammer.
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trust, conformity, perceived pro-sociality, and they have more to lose
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Like I said, addressing the hypothetical in OP. You want to explain why smart people are so dumb, go ahead, but that's the real world. I would bet IQ would have a near perfect correlation with vaccination rate, especially among young people, based on proxies we can see.
Every college in the country you'd actually want to go to mandated the vaccine as far as I can tell, the military required it, and in general educated professions seem to have higher uptake with lawyers and doctors high on the list and fitness instructors and retail sales staff low on the list, the unemployed lower still.
It would have a profound effect to kill 25% of anyone who attended classes at every selective college in the past six years. Which given that you had to be fully vaxxed to attend, it would be pretty damn near the full quarter. We'd be losing a disproportionate number of future start up founders, political leaders, scientists, academics etc. Throw in killing 25% of serving military members, that's a massacre of a huge portion of young people who are going to amount to anything in this country. That's a sci-fi dystopian scenario. Probably destroys the country.
UT Austin becomes the best university in The World
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I'm not disagreeing with the figures and what happened.
Maybe a lot of these high-achievers really didn't have the time to do their own research and just went with the flow out of habit.
And maybe they are high IQ, but that would suggest to me that they need to add a few questions to IQ tests similar to the Voigt-Kampff test
'The tortoise lies on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.'
'Why aren't you helping?'
Well it seemed to help when The Wave magazine gave all of San Francisco's mayoral candidates the vk test (not really a spoiler - Gavin Newsom is a replicant.)
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The smartest and richest folk during the Qing were the ones most likely to practice footbinding. Adhering to social customs can trump intelligence; in some ways, ability to consistently adhere to social custom despite costs is a major component of intelligence.
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