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CDC has released a report today finding preliminary association between the Pfizer vaccine and stroke for those over 65 years of age.
Another drop in the bucket - or is the bucket spilling out the top now?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/bivalent-boosters.html
Pfizer is associated significantly with strokes - CDC is keeping us in the dark about the exact data.
They then list multiple studies that did not replicate this finding for the BIVALENT vaccine - well of course, this vaccine was testing on mice, and then deployed without long term testing. Do they have monovalent data they are not mentioning?
EDIT: Is it possible monovalent risk benefit analysis is simply using a different pathogen, and now with the advent of Omicron, this is a medical update saying this level of strokes is no longer worth the benefit vs the current pathogen? Food for thought.
This contradicts what Paul Offit's opinion is, which was posted in the NEJM. Paul Offit believes we should not give bivalent boosters to young healthy patients.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780
It would be much more shocking to announce a chance to the vaccine campaign, than to keep the current inertia the same. I think we are seeing a communication strategy developing to deliver the population into accepting yearly mRNA vaccines - instead, they will be directed to other worthwhile candidates for vaccination - IF pharma companies can even deliver those.
In my eyes: mRNA vaccines are dangerous, so you need to determine how dangerous the pathogen presenting is. I see a great use case for mRNA developing for Airborne Ebola Zaire strains (90% mortality) or other disease of similar magnitude. Simply put: your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible. 1 in a million, whereas these vaccines might be 1 in 100,000.
The vaccine debate has to be the least productive of any topic. has anyone on either side ever had their minds changed on this issue despite all the ink spilled? Given how many people have taken the vaccines (billions worldwide) if there was even a small uptick in deaths and other complications, it would be a huge deal and unavoidable. You would not need to comb through huge troves of data to find maybe a tiny uptick in deaths for some small cohort
Don't regret the first two shots, regret the booster and don't think the vaccine should be taken by people <50 years of age.
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I had my assumptions challenged. I thought the vaccines would be fine (ie a net benefit across all age cohorts), but when they were being recommended to children and young men I found myself to opinions other than the vaccines are the best/worst thing ever.
In a bunch of countries there is newish data indicating increased excess deaths not attributable to Covid. The confounders are myriad, but there is allegedly an unattributed signal to analyse.
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I also changed my opinion after researching it. I was happy to get the first 2 jabs knowing what I did then, but the case for boosters in a post-Omicron world seems weak at best. Agree, however, that the magnitude of vaccine-related deaths is very small at this point.
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Raising my Hand. My mind was changed on vaccine. Never a mandate fan. And I do think one dose of vaccine is useful if you haven’t had COVID but I’m solidly against jabbing every 6 months.
I think a lot of people on this camp
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An easy way to falsify 'has anyone on either side ever changed their minds' is to ask: "where did all the anti-covid-vaccine people come from"? There are many more of them than there were vocal antivaxxers in 2016. It's not really productive as it stands though, few involved (I'm not one of them) understand enough about immunology, pharmaceutical development, epidemiology to really add anything .
I'm having a hard time seeing how even experts are adding much here. The subject matter is too complex. It's like trying to describe the flight of a baseball by the interactions of the atoms within the baseball. Theoretically possible, but not likely to be useful. That's why we need to take an outside view. Group A takes the vaccine. Group B doesn't. What are the outcome differences of those groups (taking into account externalities as much as possible)?
We can talk about spike proteins until we're blue in the face, but that's just theory, compared to the results which can be measured from a vaccine given to billions of people.
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Yes? Many people took the first round and adamantly refuse to take any boosters.
I took the first round and then later got COVID. And then later got COVID yet again. My understanding is that getting COVID gives immunity around as good as the shot. I'm not sure if boosters would significantly help me.
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Almost all those not taking boosters - which is more than half of those who've had a shot - do so because they think they're already vaccinated and protected / the pandemic's over / don't see the point, but are still happy about the first shots.
How do you know it's almost all? The first booster was out before the pandemic was "over" (the mask/test/recovery/vax mandates were still in effect, and the propaganda was still in full force). Me and my wife took the first 2 shots, and now regret it, several of our friends are in the same situation, and some even took the boosters against their will.
Both from talking to people IRL in a variety of walks of life, casually browsing many parts of the internet - probably 10% of the population at least has some form of vaccine-concern, but at least >75% of the vaccinated-non-boostered are content with the initial vaccines, probably.
Glancing at a study here - data from june/july 2022, published a week ago - seems to agree.
... okay, more than glancing, I downloaded the data, and filtered for the US (idk maybe i messed something up, but it matches with the figures):
\3. The risks of COVID-19 disease are greater than the risks of the vaccine
{ 'Strongly Agree': 507, 'Somewhat Agree': 202, 'Unsure/no opinion': 157, 'Somewhat disagree': 64, 'Strongly disagree': 70, Unanswered: undefined}
\4. The COVID-19 vaccines available to me are safe
{ 'Strongly Agree': 470, 'Somewhat Agree': 238, 'Unsure/no opinion': 156, 'Somewhat disagree': 60, 'Strongly disagree': 76, Unanswered: undefined}
And when filtered for answered anything other than 'no' on 'have you received a dose' q7
\3. The risks of COVID-19 disease are greater than the risks of the vaccine
{ 'Strongly Agree': 493, 'Somewhat Agree': 172, 'Unsure/no opinion': 94, 'Somewhat disagree': 27, 'Strongly disagree': 20, Unanswered: undefined}
\4. The COVID-19 vaccines available to me are safe
{ 'Strongly Agree': 465, 'Somewhat Agree': 224, 'Unsure/no opinion': 89, 'Somewhat disagree': 20, 'Strongly disagree': 8, Unanswered: undefined}
Open access data is really nice.
On the other hand, here's a rasmussen poll - https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/covid_19/concerns_about_covid_19_vaccines_remain_high . Polling is hard.
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I used to do vaccine research for a living and when the Covid vaccines rolled out, I advised people that asked me that they should take them because they'll probably work just fine. The couple years of evidence that we now have has led me to switch over to saying that the Covid vaccines are comically bad, the authorities saying otherwise are ridiculous liars, and the retconning to "it was never supposed to prevent infection" undermines the credibility of all future vaccines. So yeah, I'd say that my mind has changed.
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I’m not sure we haven’t. Look at this. https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/another-look-at-uk-all-cause-mortality
Where is the author wrong?
I'm thinking of doing a top-level post on this next week, but it seems like this data doesn't necessarily jive with results in other countries. For example, in France, in a country with high vaccination rates, 2022 excess deaths in the 15-64 age category are actually down considerably from normal levels:
https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/
England and U.S. mortality is up however. Perhaps its obesity or fentanyl related?
It would be interesting. And maybe there are just abnormalities in country by country numbers but given the high excess deaths in 20-21 you’d expect a large drop in excess deaths in 22.
Would also be interesting to see data on births. I’ve seen some series suggesting there has been a large drop in births and there was the Israeli data on sperm motility. It’s frustrating that we don’t get this info easily since a lot of country possess this info.
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Well, let's say you did not want to take the vaccine, and you were mandated to take it. You could choose either J&J, mRNA, Novavax, or even fly overseas to get Covaxin. You may begin debating at that point.
mRNA vs. Other vaccines is a very difficult topic, because defanging a countries ability to give mandated vaccines is bad, but mandating vaccines that are bad isn't good. In fact, perhaps extreme caution should be taken based on the prior.
Why should a state even have the ability to mandate medical treatment when that's a very clear bright line violation of natural rights?
I care much more about the ethics of mandates than I do the specifics of efficacy. The individual must make the informed decision on this, not the state, and any mandates are tyranny that must be defended against to the death.
There is certainly a debate to be had about mRNA, a very necessary one, which was poisoned by the will to impose without discussion as we now know for a fact, but the idea that we should assume from the beginning that the State has to retain tyrannical powers in the name of public health is insane.
This seems like overly dramatic macho posturing. Obviously you are still alive and didn’t do anything of the sort.
Can you seriously not imagine a situation where mandates would be warranted? I don’t support the mandates for COVID, but being unwilling to even consider that there might be a point where the tradeoff scales tip is just an unreasonably ideological suicide pact. If there were a hypothetical disease much more deadly than COVID, surely you must be able to imagine such a thing
If someone is charged by a needle-wielding thug with the intent to stab them with it, I believe they are entitled to defend themselves, up to and including using lethal force against the assailant. Even if said thug is an agent of the state. Of course, this would be analogous to compulsory vaccination, which is not the form most vaccine mandates took in 2021. Rather, they are more akin to a mugging, and that's a slightly greyer area when it comes to whether lethal force is appropriate for self defence.
Regardless, medical coercion is a gross violation of ethics. Even in the absence of vaccine mandates themselves, lockdownist regimes violated medical ethics in how they offered the vaccines. They advertised that restrictions would go away without vaccines, hence created the implicit threat of more restrictions in the case of refusal.
My judgement on this comes from the UKDH reference guide to consent for examination or treatment, which says:
On this basis, the existence of vaccine mandates clearly poses a risk for violating informed consent, as it introduces duress in several ways. Firstly, it means pressure or undue influence being exerted on the person to accept treatment from government, employers, retail services etc. Secondly, it also means threats of the withdrawal of privileges in an environment with involuntary detention. See how specific the language here is, how closely and specifically it applies to the circumstances of vaccine mandates in countries that carried out lockdowns, despite the age of the document long predating covid. That should hint that these recommendations are not simply some backporting or recency bias for the sake of winning an argument, but instead represent best practice as it was already understood.
Even political leaders broadcasting claims that vaccines are a route out of lockdowns, or that unless X% of the population are vaccinated that restrictions will continue, introduces duress. However, this is more of a footnote, as regimes that carried out the false imprisonment of the entire population are already instantly rendered illegitimate by doing so.
Personally, I found the whole process so fucking disgusting that I refused to take the vaccines purely on the basis of that. I don't care if they're the best or the worst vaccines in the world. The rubicon is crossed, and the relevant institution is no longer trustworthy. For the state to insist that people are born subhuman, and only acquire rights after jumping through regime-approved hoops and injecting regime-approved substances on a regime-approved schedule... The very thought sickens me. The fact that a large proportion of my fellow countrymen, as if somehow I can regard them in such friendly terms any more, agreed with these mandates sickens me even more.
Even mandatory vaccinations would not consist of "needle-wielding thugs" charging you trying to stab you.
Is not a remotely rational description. Nowhere in the Western world did vaccine requirements come anywhere near the level of the unhinged rhetoric you keep repeating. (China wielding people inside their houses? That's legitimately terrifying, but also not an aberration in China.) You are not describing reality. You are not describing actual events, behaviors, or policies. You have never, in all the time you have ridden this hobby horse, described the world we live in. Nothing you have described actually happened, ever.
Austria came close to criminalizing being unvaccinated, aborting plans to do so at the last minute.
Some countries implemented lockdowns on the basis of vaccine status. Again Austria comes to mind as an example. Austria's regime did decide that people who did not jump through regime-approved hoops and take regime-approved medication on a regime-approved schedule are so unworthy that they do not deserve the right to leave their homes. I don't know what to call that beyond treating them as subhuman. Many more places decided that they couldn't be allowed to attend events, restaurants and bars, shops etc. Even the US, to this day, continues to regard unvaccinated people as lesser by making it illegal for them to enter the country.
And I've seen enough rhetoric from governments and supporters of mandatory vaccinations to know that, without pushback, they'd have gone further. Because of this, I'm not particularly interested in merited impossibility, nor lockdown denial.
Even if I believe you (I don't), you're describing something that was floated as a proposal, not something that actually happened.
I could reword almost any law to sound ridiculous and dystopian. "Some people are treated as so subhuman they aren't even allowed to get behind the wheel of a car!"
There are many situations in which the government can restrict your freedom to travel. While you may not agree with all (or any) of them, they are not "treating you as subhuman." Unless you're an anarchist and you believe all laws are treating you as subhuman, in which case, okay, that would at least be consistent if still irrational.
All countries have restrictions on who can enter, and the US is not the only one that includes vaccinations as a requirement, and not all vaccination requirements are COVID-related. So every country in the world regards some people as "lesser" in this fashion.
Your rhetoric is unhinged and counterfactual.
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I will not fedpost, but I quit my job over this and moved to a sane country, I think that's enough skin in the game for this conversation.
And no I don't see a point where the government is allowed to become tyrannical because the very legitimacy of the government stems from it not being so. Not even if the bodies are piling up in the streets will I accept to be injected with drugs against my will.
Mary Mallon would have been entirely justified to kill her captors and escape for by the point they imprisoned her in perpetuity they broke the social contract and returned her and themselves to the state of Nature.
Health decisions about one's body must rest in individual will however much it is possible. Informed consent is the bare minimum. Anything else is ethically unacceptable.
I was unfamiliar with that but assuming that following is accurate I do not consider it as straightforward. And if you go "returned her and themselves to the state of Nature" then it anyway justifies using raw power to overpower everyone else anyway - and I do not think that it is in any way better.
(...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
I don't think you understand, one has a duty to escape the state of nature if at all possible (at least according to Hobbes) and enter into more adequate equilibria in general. That tyrannical governments force us out of it by defecting is a moral sin. But once it's you vs the world, yes anything is permitted. John Smith is perfectly legitimate to blow away any and all law enforcement sent by a congress that would pass the kill-John-Smith-on-sight act, or to break any laws passed by such a body as they are now null and void concerning him.
This is not an argument against rebellion, it is an argument against tyranny.
In the case of Mary specifically it's extremely debated whether she knew for a fact she was responsible for those illnesses (which I do believe would carry some amount of responsibility vis à vis nonagression), but I'm merely referring here to the injustice of her perpetual imprisonment as punishment for existing as a danger.
In such a circumstance I would rebel, because there would be nothing else to do than rebel, asking for people to acquiesce to the destruction of their autonomy or indeed to their own destruction is game-theoretically unreasonable, and that's the fundamental truth that natural law attempts to point out.
And this truth, embedded in the concept of natural rights is what makes forcing people to engage in medical procedures unreasonable. You can't reasonably ask people to give up control of their own body. And I don't think it's overstating it to say that this is a matter worth dying over because people have done so in its name in the past.
The issue is they tried to give her several outs, as in not working as a cook. Its only when she went to some lengths to continue doing that, that they locked her up entirely.
If she was justified in killing those who imprisoned her then those she endangered would be justified in outright killing her. But they tried not to do that.
If being imprisoned allows one to kill to stop it, then being infected with a deadly disease by someone who has been told multiple times to stop doing the thing that caused outbreaks should also meet that bar.
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As an observer of the vaccine debates, its not useful to me on the specifics of the vaccine. I didn't take it and probably wont have to ever, had covid, its over.
But the meta-debate does allow me to calibrate my opinion of who to trust. Whose predictions panned out, who lied, who was okay with lying for the "greater good", etc. Im predicting in the coming years, a lot of people will be vindicated and a lot of people will have pies on their faces. The rhetorical stakes are too high for it to be any other way now.
If anything, atleast now I know who (almost everyone) is totally okay with me being a second class citizen on the premise of refusing certain medication. Some masks are off permanently. Them denying this in the future wont change my opinion of them.
Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of people for which it's not yet over. The federal gov't is still litigating at least two of their mandates, a mandate is now firmly implanted in immigration law, and there may well be state mandate battles still going on to boot. I probably cannot capture the absurdity of it, either, because what they are still trying to force on people is the original vaccine. Not even updated vaccines that are tailored to the current strains. They're still fighting in courts for the ability to force people to take shots now that are essentially useless (especially since most non-vaxxed folks have almost certainly had some strain of COVID by now), under threat of firing them, taking away their contracts, or prohibiting them from entering the United States.
In the Fifth Circuit's en banc oral argument, the fact that the vaccines don't do a great job at preventing infection or transmission came up, and the gov't said that their position could still be sustained on the grounds that it reduces the risk of severe cases/death. When pressed on whether the gov't could, on the same grounds, require everyone to get below a certain BMI, as obesity brings severe risks which are endemic in our society, they basically just said, "Yeah, we wouldn't do that tho."
This is why it's still so important. If there is not enough anti-authoritarian energy to form a hard consensus that the gov't should not even have the option to do such things, those people will go beyond the mask of "we won't force you to take certain medication". There will be more masks to come.
I am fully aware that the "real fight" is far from over given that many questionable laws are put into place and there is no precedent that all that was done for covid would not be repeated in the future. If anything the probability that it would be repeated is not infinitely higher. So that is a new CW battlefront in the making.
However, this seems to be mostly a (country with high state capacity) problem. Many countries have really left covid in the past and anything associated with it altogether.
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same here. i got it twice. the first time it was like a cold, second time only very mild. it's over .
Isn't there some worry that repeated Covid infections (or boosters) could cause long-term damage? I've definitely heard this claimed. Not sure how much of this is crackpot.
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Agreed. I personally have a high esteem for many people on both sides of the issue - that's what makes this query so incisive and important.
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