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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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The full bear case seems to be unlikely of widespread ADE. We haven’t had waves of increasing death rates. I guess it’s still possible.

Losing effectiveness seems true.

From what I can gather most people here seem to have an awareness of excess deaths but are lacking explanatory power for why.

ADE also I do not believe would have a correlation to the prior issues of being sick from the vaccine for 1-2 days, heart problems in mostly young men, and some sort of hormonal issue effecting female menstrual cycles.

I do find it weird how so many PMC message boards would have been confirming the “safety” of the vaccines at the same time everyone’s just reporting a normal 36 hr fever and desire to stay in bed all day after vaccination. But that’s just one of a dozen things during COVID where people seemed to develop weird beliefs that seemed to not have a connection to the objective world.

We haven’t had waves of increasing death rates. I guess it’s still possible.

We've just had increasing excess deaths? This is exactly what the hypothesis posted above would predict - an increasing number of people dying from a weakening of their immune and cardiovascular systems. There's so much variability (how strong was their immune system before the vaccine, what illnesses do they actually catch, what is the environment they're in, how fit they are, etc) that this would in fact just show up as unexplained excess deaths.

Losing effectiveness seems true.

Yes, this is what the steelmanned antivaxx position (at least in my mind) would be claiming - that the vaccine, after a two-week period of heightened risk, provides a period of bolstered resistance to the virus. The effectiveness of that bolstered resistance goes down over time, hence the need for boosters, but each booster provides a shorter-lived burst of protection and without intervention the decline actually continues down to below baseline.

From what I can gather most people here seem to have an awareness of excess deaths but are lacking explanatory power for why.

Weakened immune system and unintended vaccine side-effects.

But that’s just one of a dozen things during COVID where people seemed to develop weird beliefs that seemed to not have a connection to the objective world.

It isn't a case of them "seeming to develop" weird beliefs, but the distorting influence of the massive wealth and social power held by the corporations responsible for manufacturing the MRNA vaccines. Look at the recent twitter files - when those companies were given the ability to remove misinformation, they also removed things like activists talking about how the vaccines should not be another excuse for these corporations to profit off of government largesse. The bodies and mechanisms society uses to develop and work out these beliefs has been damaged and hijacked by vested interests of the kind pointed out in the article I linked, so it is no wonder that a lot of people are going to be confused (not to mention that many people will simply lie about their beliefs or reasoning because expressing any kind of hesitancy or skepticism about the MRNA vaccines gets you thrown into the basket of deplorables).

“Below baseline”. That seems bigger than we are seeing. ADE I don’t think has happened yet.

That’s why I posted the conclusion you want to come to - vaccine deaths seems possible now. But I want to investigate and see if that’s true.

It was weird how often people repeated “it’s safe” without seeing data to verify (ie took the word of the FDA).