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A new New York State Covid-19 Dataset was released a few days ago. I thought it was a good opportunity to see the progress of the vaccination campaign. I think it's great data for an attack on the performative ritual of getting 'vaccinated' to encourage others to get vaccinated as well (which is what a lot of people were convinced to do). Obviously, those who got vaccinated to "protect other people" stand on shakier ground now.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-updates-new-yorkers-states-progress-combating-covid-19-467
First, let's establish something important. mRNA vaccines have a established, not fully understood connection to peri-myocarditis. mRNA can cause heart damage in a way that other vaccines seem to avoid. I would say this is an important explanation for the following data:
Percent of New Yorkers ages 18 and older with completed vaccine series - 85.5%
We all know how this was done. OSHA directed mandate, NYC mandate, banning people from shows, restaurants, bars until they receive an EUA injection, healthcare worker mandate, bribing people 100$ a shot. Science communication and incentives couldn't get people to take a novel vaccination method. NYS is almost 20% unionized, and the mandate was really helpful in boosting the low minority vaccination rate, since so many of those individuals work unionized, mandated jobs.
Now that these incentives are gone, let's see what the uptake is:
**Percent of all New Yorkers who are up to date - 14.1%
**
Most New Yorkers ignore CDC guidance now. Covid-19 will be gone in a few years. Covid-19 will be retired as a word for "novel entry of pathogen SARS-2," SARS-2 will be renamed HC-391237 or OC-32871 (random examples) or something, and the "covid-19 vaccine" will be rightly seen as a genetic version of a "flu shot" like intervention.
Consumers who want "flu shot" like vaccines, will eventually come to prefer conventional, protein adjuvanted vaccination methods.
Why would a 19 year old ever get an mRNA injection, when they could get a shot of Covaxin? The main purpose of the shot being to end the harassment from the public health infrastructure, and gain employment or education.
**Percent of New Yorkers ages 0-4 with completed vaccine series - 7.9%
**
This makes me think the vaccine could be seen as dangerous to parents. Keep in mind that all high-risk (on ventilator) children have probably been vaccinated, but some likely have not.
The vaccine campaign was a performance. Young healthy people were asked by the CDC to pretend that genetic Covid-19 vaccination was completely benign and well understood, with the goal of ultimately getting high-risk patients to take the higher risk vaccine.
If 20-29 year olds were allowed to say "no, that vaccine causes heart damage, obviously not worth getting," skepticism would trickle up to individuals who should arguably take advantage of the more advanced vaccination method. May the benefits outweigh the risks. No one believes in "do no harm" in the age of state-mandated genetic injections.
Nope, and hopefully it stays that way.
There is good evidence that early in the pandemic when COVID was less contagious and our vaccines actually targeted the circulating strain that spread was significantly (though not completely) reduced in vaccinated populations. Here I wrote a brief summary of some of the evidence available in August 2021. I still believe the COVID-19 vaccines are very safe as written here, and reiterated in this space more recently. Overall I stand by most of what I've written, although I was too slow to update on how low-risk COVID was for younger folks and the implications that should have had on our public health response.
The other interesting angle to this that doesn't seem to come up very often is the idea that COVID actually was similar in severity to a cold/flu, but this is just what that looks like for a virus we've never been exposed to before. Namely, if you had somehow avoided exposure to influenza/rhinovirus/other coronaviruses before being exposed at the age of 70-80, would you have the same CFR as COVID-19 circa 2020-2021? Or did the evolution of COVID from 'less-transmissible, more-deadly' to increased contagiousness and decreased pathogenicity just happen on much faster timescales that we expected? My money is on mostly (1) with a small degree of (2), but I'm not an expert and I stopped caring about the literature over a year ago.
As for the vaccines, if they don't update them I'm not planning to bother unless forced to by my employer. Even if they do update them, I'd probably treat it the way I do the flu vaccine: If they run a clinic at my workplace and I just have to walk downstairs and wait for a few minutes I'll do it, otherwise not going out of my way.
Since @desolation asked: I still think Fauci is fine and well-intentioned. The public health response was bad at first due to obstructionists/defectors and bad later on in service of either stupidity or the gerontocracy - i.e. a fairly accurate reflection of the political factions with power in our system, and I likely made a mistake carrying water in support of it at least in some cases. Lab leak still seems like a toss-up, but China has acted fairly sus the whole time.
If Lab Leak is a toss-up, shouldn't that mean there's at least a 50% chance he's neither fine nor well-intentioned?
Lab leak is shorthand for half a dozen scenarios I've seen bandied about. Off the top of my head:
Secret Chinese bioweapons program inadvertently released.
Secret Chinese bioweapons program intentionally released to depopulate an aging population and wreak havoc in the soft Western countries.
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus study program that released it through negligence/misconduct (stuff like Chinese researchers historically eating research animals after experiments conclude)
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus program that inadvertently made it more pathological via humanized mice or other experiments.
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus program in some small part funded in collaboration with NIH (In which I've previously argued Fauci has little personal responsibility and you should primarily be upset with the study section which approved the grant).
Globalist plot by Fauci and NWO to [use your imagination lest I be accused of strawmanning or partisan hackery].
In the majority he bears no responsibility, in some cases he bears (I would argue) some small amount of blame relative to a number of other actors and in only one is he ill-intentioned. I maintain that even if you strongly believe in the lab leak and malfeasance, most of the animus towards Fauci is based on the fact that his face is on TV and telling people things they didn't want to hear while leaving most of the people who made those decisions to get off scot-free.
edit: fixing numbering scheme
Why are 2, 3, and 4 separated? Regardless of how it got out, it did get NIH funding, no? He was pushing his weight around trying to discredit the Lab Leak theory, wasn't he?
Because the total annual budget for a research institute will be in the tens of millions of dollars (bit of a rough guess as it's hard for me to tran, and the ecohealth alliance given to WIV was in the low 6 figures per annum if I remember correctly - most of the funding goes to American researchers. That's enough money to fund a couple of students/scientists, not even a full lab. There's maybe 45-50 professors at WIV, each with their own grants and projects. It's entirely possible that they had a completely separate project distinct from Ecohealth that involved coronaviruses/humanized mice/chimeric viruses/GoF that went poorly.
Yes, as was I. It's worth remembering that early on the evidence being cited by lab leak truthers was actual garbage that was easily refuted; the fact that people were pushing the lab leak theory in the absence of data early on gave me the strong belief that they had ulterior motives. It took a while for the case to build. The narrative isn't so cut and dried as bigoted PhDs hate internet amateurs who had mountains of evidence to make their case.
I do agree with you that Fauci did try to spike the story early. It's not clear to me whether that was out of a circling of the wagons to try and maintain support for scientific funding, whether it was trying to avoid personal culpability/scandal or something else entirely.
But...again, say you believe me for a moment that most of the relevant decisions were made by other people and rubber stamped by Fauci's office. Are you still going to obsess over Fauci, or try and understand the process that led to that decision?
"They were funding research just as dangerous as the one that could have caused the pandemic, but by dumb luck theirs was likely not involved in it" is acting fine and well intentioned?
You did not have access to the same information as Faucci, so you can be excused, even though basic critical thinking was enough to tell they were overconfident in dismissing the theory.
Why go with what the truthers were saying, instead of what Faucci and his colleagues were? Also the arguments supposedly refuting the lab leak were themselves just as easy to refute.
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