The Magic of mRNA Will Push Medical Advances for Everyone:
mRNA is one of the first molecules of life. While identified six decades ago as the carrier of the blueprint for proteins in living cells, its pharmaceutical potential was long underestimated. mRNA appeared unpromising—too unstable, too weak in potency, and too inflammatory.
The successful development of the first mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 in 2020 was an unprecedented achievement in the history of medicine. That success was built on iterative progress over decades, driven by the independent contributions of scientists around the world.
We fell in love with mRNA in the '90s because of its versatility, its ability to stimulate the immune system, and its safety profile—after fulfilling its biological task, the molecule completely degrades, leaving no trace in the body. We discovered ways to exponentially improve the properties of mRNA, increasing its stability and efficacy, as well as the ability to deliver it to the right immune cells in the body. That progress allowed us to create effective mRNA vaccines that, when administered in small amounts to humans, elicit powerful immune responses. Moreover, we established rapid, scalable processes to manufacture new vaccine candidates for clinical application within weeks. The result was mRNA's breakthrough in the fight against Covid-19.
The potential of mRNA vaccines goes beyond the coronavirus. We now want to use this technology to tackle two of the world's oldest and deadliest pathogens: malaria and tuberculosis. Worldwide, there are around 10 million new cases of tuberculosis every year. For malaria, the medical need is even higher: about 230 million malaria cases have been reported in the WHO Africa region in 2020, with most deaths occurring among children under 5.
One of the beauties of mRNA technology is that it enables us to rapidly test hundreds of vaccine targets. Moreover, we can combine multiple mRNAs—each encoding a different pathogen antigen—within a single vaccine. For the first time, it has become feasible for an mRNA-based vaccine to teach the human immune system to fight against multiple vulnerable targets of a pathogen. In 2023, we plan to begin clinical trials for the first mRNA vaccine candidates against malaria and tuberculosis that combine known and new targets. If successful, this endeavor may change the way we prevent these diseases and may contribute to their eradication.
Medical innovations can only make a difference for people around the world when they are available on a global scale. The production of mRNA is complex and involves tens of thousands of steps, making technology transfer resource- and time-intensive, and error-prone. To overcome this bottleneck, we have developed a high-tech solution called BioNTainer—a shippable, modular mRNA manufacturing facility. This innovation could support decentralized and scalable vaccine production worldwide by leapfrogging toward automated, digitized, and scalable mRNA manufacturing capability. We expect the first facility to be up and running in Rwanda in 2023.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01, @05:48PM (50 children)
Hopefully, they'll properly test these new vaccines, unlike the COVID ones before forcing everyone to take them. Maybe that way they won't kill and injure so many people.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01, @06:08PM (47 children)
Geez, this argument has been debunked so many times. 5.47 billion, with a B, have had the COVID vaccine. If even .1% of those were injured or killed, you would be talking about affecting 54 million people.
I can't wait to see all of this backtracking that mRNA vaccines are bad happens, especially with the cancer therapies that are coming out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Sunday January 01, @06:50PM (15 children)
Sorry, but the COVID vaccines *WERE* rushed out with less than the normal amount of testing. All the evidence says we lucked out this time, and we *did* need them more quickly than the standard testing protocols allowed, so corners were cut and exceptions were made. And everything worked out fine. But we *did* take extra risk to get the vaccines out quickly.
OTOH, not getting a vaccine out quickly would ALSO have been risky. The evidence, such as it is, says much more risky, but you can't really judge risk based on outcome. And this was a one-off event, so I can't think of a valid statistical approach.
All that said, consider the modifications to the vaccine. They are being given about the same degree of testing as modifications to the flu vaccines, but it's not really clear that that's the correct approach. Or that it isn't. So far it seems to be working out well, and I don't know that anyone can really say more than that.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Sunday January 01, @10:11PM (5 children)
My main objection is not to the fact they rushed out something against COVID, but that they labelled it a vaccine despite not going through the proper clinical trials all other vaccines did. It was an experimental therapy.
If people had been given the full information, and allowed to make an informed decision on whether to take the new therapy vs risk getting covid, and they did so, I would not have an issue about it.
However they did not do that, they rushed it through to the masses, labelled it a vaccine despite the lack of testing, and then anyone who had any concerns about it not being fully tested, potential risks, etc... was labelled an "Anti-Vaxxer", and lumped in with the fringe elements who believe vaccines are the governments way of injecting graphene nanoparticles into everyones bloodstream so they could be mind controlled by 5G radio towers.
Any objection was thus discredited, then silenced. Even doctors we visited, while publicly telling everyone to take the therapy, would in private recommend against it. They said they had to recommend you get it, otherwise they would lose their licence to practice, and with it their entire livelihood.
On the flip side, you had people driven into a state of sheer utter panic over COVID, as if it was the black death. Masses in a panic are easily controllable, and that is exactly what we saw. For those who still refused they made living a modern life almost impossible for them, from getting work to being able to go out and function in society.
Sure, it was not "mandatory" in a legal sense, but it was coerced, by them making it as hard as possible to survive without bending to their will. To make things even worse, politics was overlaid on top. Even if you did take one of the many different covid therapies that were available, it did not guarantee you free movement, because some countries would not recognise other countries covid jabs, so you would have to mix two, possibly three different covid jabs at the same time just to be able to cross borders.
Based on TFS, it seems that they used the human population as guinea pigs in an experiment without consent, with governments to provide huge funding, in order to advance mRNA technology by leaps and bounds, because of the great future potential it could offer once the technology was perfected.
It smells a bit too much of "The ends justify the means" kind of thinking, coupled with a lack of care for the risks other people unknowingly bared. A good reminder, if nothing else, that (at least western) civilisation is mostly ruled by sadists and psychopaths, and that you should always use your critical thinking skills when making decisions rather than listen to people in white coats or fancy suits on TV.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Wong McGregor on Monday January 02, @01:34AM
It's great to hear that doctors were at least honest with you off the record. In Australia, ALL doctors have likewise been threatened with de-registration by their regulator (AHPRA), if they dare to criticise the C-19 inoculation program. This continues to this very day.
Here our AMA pretty much immediately threw all their members under a bus. There is at least one new medical association fighting the threatening and censorship of medical doctors here:
https://amps.redunion.com.au/news [redunion.com.au]
In the US, at least you had the AAPS.
https://aapsonline.org/ [aapsonline.org]
Of course, everything else you say is also true. It was and is all completely at odds with the fundamental principles of Western medical ethics and science.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cmdrklarg on Monday January 02, @07:27PM (1 child)
You make it sound like they just rushed something out without testing it, which is patently false. Of course it was experimental, SARS-COV-2 was a novel virus! Yet, the vaccines all went through all 3 phases of testing before being approved for deployment. The difference in speed of deployment was mostly due to production of vaccines starting up before the trials were complete like is normally done.
Complete information was available, if one looked. Unfortunately we had a small but loud group of anti-vaxxers spreading FUD and lies, confusing things for everyone else. It didn't help with an asshole POTUS and his cult telling us that a potentially deadly disease was no big deal.
Doctors that make recommendations like that deserve to lose their license. There was overwhelming evidence that the mRNA vaccines were safe and effective. Going against the evidence like that due to their "feelings" has no place in medicine.
Panic is as panicky people are. This thing was killing people and filling the hospitals; I don't blame some for panicking. Ignorant deniers are worse, however.
No, it was not coerced. You had the freedom to refuse the shots. The rest of us also had the freedom to not associate with you.
You can thank the aforementioned asshole POTUS for making the pandemic political. He'd still be POTUS if he hadn't.
mRNA tech has been in development since the 1990s; while it is relatively new it is not bleeding edge stuff.
The ends were to help humanity to weather the SARS-COV-2 storm with a minimum of sickness and deaths. The vaccines were shown to have far, far fewer risks than the actual disease.
Those two sentences are absolutely worth taking to heart. The key is to listen, and then verify what is being told to you. One must take care when trusting the wrong "authority" however. Do you listen and believe a politician? Or do you listen to an immunologist?
My $0.02, YMMV
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Wong McGregor on Tuesday January 03, @02:07AM
This is a good example of the uncensored 'safe and effective' (pro-vax) position which you will find practically everywhere, especially on the censored internet. The main problem with it is that it is in very large part a constructed fiction because there is comparatively little evidence to back up or support it. It makes comparatively little specific reference to the actual world. It is therefore mainly sustained by censoring those who oppose and present evidence against it.
For the opposing, so-called anti-vax position (interestingly enough, led, particularly at the international level, by vaccinologists and other medical scientists and doctors) you will need to got to the uncensored internet. For good locations to go for this side of the argument/debate (of course their was no public debate (as this latter position was publically censored)) see my later posts.
The only testing was in the clinical trials, where the mRNA vaccines were tested as vaccines and NOT as gene therapies (which is what these vaccines are and have a much higher regulatory bar to traverse). These clinical trials were run by the vaccine manufacturers themselves and so were prone to being gamed. See the following discussion by an AZ trial whistleblower of the conduct of their and other C-19 clinical trials:
https://thehighwire.com/videos/vaccine-trial-participant-speaks-out/ [thehighwire.com]
Most evidence relating to covid therefore has to be interpreted very carefully as most of it has been gamed to some (often a large) degree. Even mortality data has been gamed (see my later post which includes a reference to this).
Even given all this, the Pfizer phase three clinical trial recorded more mortality in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated (placebo) group, and so, from the very beginning, there was no identifiable overall benefit to the vaccinated in terms of mortality. This has been the case since and, especially due to immune escape by the successive variants, has only become worse over time.
Although perhaps large by standards of clincal trials, clinical trials are not especially extensive in either their number of participants or their duration.
For a truly large number of participants one needs to look to the pharmacovigilance databases (VAERS etc). These are also not controlled by the vaccine manufacturers themelves and so are less prone to be gamed. These passive databased do however have very high rates of under-reporting so their analysis requires interpretation particularly in the light of this (See the Kirsch, Rose & Crawford estimate of vaccine related deaths that I have linked to in a later post for an example of such interpretation).
The now clearly far from either "rare" or "mild", cardiac injuries from the C-19 vaccines (especially myocarditis and pericarditis) were not detected in the clinical trials or indeed by the any health authority. Phizer also attempted to prevent the full clinical trial data being released. That which has been released to this point has identified over 1,500 types of injury related to the Phizer vaccine.
Both of these sources have a very short term bias. The above AZ trial lasted only 60 days. So there was basically was no medium to long term testing.
Some data was available, which due to the widespread censorship could be very difficult to find. There is practically no data which suggests that the vaccines were very safe as we have seen in the case of both of the above sources of data. The pharmcovigilance database evidence suggest that these the C-19 vaccines are exceptionally dangerous, relative to all other vaccines that they have covered.
For instance, in Australia, since the 70s roughly 3 vaccine related deaths were reported per year. Currently, since the C-19 vaccines were released, reported vaccine deaths are running at least 800 per year.
The initial effectiveness results were reported in a very misleading way. Subsequently, it has become particularly apparent that, as some, especially Geert vanden Bossche predicted in March 2021, their effectiveness, particular in stopping infection and transmission, has been completely overwhelmed by immune escape due to the evolution of the virus. If such infection and so the replication of the virus cannot be avoided, then this evolution in response to the vaccines will continue to erode the effectiveness of the vaccines, ultimately eliminating all their claimed positive benefits (for instance, their capacity to prevent severe disease and deaths, the only things that the official narrative now claims for them).
Doctors should be required to inform their patients of the risks that this face in taking an experiemental therapy that has poor short term and no medium to long term safety data. This is particularly true of healthy populations who were the main (if an inappropriate) target of the vaccines. Patients, on the other hand, should have the right to deny consent and so refuse such a therapy. This is just the traditional Western medical ethics that, at least prior to covid was the norm in countries like Australia. Since covid, the centrality of the doctor-patient relationship has been replaced by the doctor-medical authority relationship. That is, the rights of the patient are now largely absent.
What was mainly killing people was the absence of treatment (eg. wait for the vaccine), medical mistreatment (the promotion of therapies far more dangerous than covid itself for the majority of the population (primarilty the C-19 vaccines and Remdesivir) and suppression of safe and cheap, since out of patent, alternatives (HCQ and ivermectin) which were therefore unpopular with big pharma.
In many, especially health and aged care, but also many others (such as even working in the majority of supermarkets here) professions in Australia you could not work, if you did not get vaccinated. Since vaccination is ineffective against covid, it has proven to be mainly inoculation against job loss (ie. coercion).
It was always inherently political. In Australia, all the major political parties were and still are owned by big pharma. They used this control of governments to mandate the consumption of their products to healthy populations in spite of their either poor or non-existent safety record.
The mRNA vaccines are very different to traditional vaccines. The incorporation of lipid nanoparticles mean that they do not stay in the site of injection, but rather travel around the body, in particular to the major organs. They turn the bodies cells into spike protein factories, exposing the body to far higher and largely uncontrolled levels of spike protein. The spike protein is the most toxic part of the virus. Hence, unlike traditional vaccines, they create inflammation in the major organs. This is most obvious from the cardiac injuries that vaccinees can sustain, since these injuries can lead to heart failure and death. These injuries also do not seem to be very "rare" as medical authorities have attempted to claim. Nor are they, quite obviously, "mild", as they have also attempted to claim, since they frequently lead to hospitalisation and, indeed, death. Some studies have found incidences of cardiac injury greater than 1 in 100.
Where is the evidence of this? Excess mortality is up all across the Western world, since the rollout of the vaccines. In Australia, for instance, excess mortality is up about 15 per cent. The vast majority of those admitted to and in hospitals for covid are vaccinated.
I couldn't agree more with this.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 02, @07:56PM
>they labelled it a vaccine despite not going through the proper clinical trials all other vaccines did.
Not that anyone cares, not in a cesspool where a completely false statement gets moderated to +4, but they completed Phase III trials, unusually large ones in fact:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 [nejm.org]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday January 05, @03:34AM
The term 'vaccine' in modern usage just means something that is intended to provoke an immune response that hopefully provides the recipient with some level of immunity to the actual illness. The word says nothing about tested, untested, or fast-tracked. So, yes, the COVID vaccines were indeed correctly called vaccines.
If you think the vaccine was somehow mandated, try not showering for a while and see how welcome you are in public.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Sunday January 01, @10:33PM
The main thing that is being overlooked in my opinion, is what did we learn from the past 3 years. Are we (as the world, not as individuals) going to make the same mistakes when the next pandemic happens? To me the really interesting things are, are we going to be able to respond quickly enough? Will we be able to inform the public better? Will there be riots again? Of course there will be people doing exactly the opposite of what's sensible, but can we steer them a little better? I believe that it's worthwhile to put some effort into objectively studying these things, before the next one hits us.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 02, @02:08AM (4 children)
That's more an indication that there was something wrong with the normal amount of testing.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Wong McGregor on Monday January 02, @02:37AM (3 children)
How? More people seem to have died and in a very short time span from the C-19 vaccines than seemingly any other vaccine in recent history. Certainly since pharmacovigilance databases like VAERS existed. As early as August of 2021, there were estimates (now seemingly underestimates), based on VAERS, that over 150K Americans had died directly from the C-19 vaccines.
https://sunfellow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/VAERS-Deaths-Kirsch-Rose-Crawford.pdf [sunfellow.com]
Why is speed to market such an important metric for the success for an almost entirely new technology (mRNA vaccines) that it over-rides safety? After all, by Sept/Oct 2020, well before the arrival of the vaccines, leading medical scientists were pointing out that covid did not present a threat to the vast majority of the population.
https://gbdeclaration.org/ [gbdeclaration.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Monday January 02, @02:45AM
How many such "recent history" vaccines are in widespread use? And the "seem to have died" count includes a bunch of people who didn't die from the vaccine at all.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 02, @03:27AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Thursday January 05, @03:51AM
That paper is practically a study in not understanding statistics. First, note that ANY death following a vaccine, even if well understood and clearly not caused by the vaccine, is reportable. Get a tetanus shot and then get hit by a city buss, it's reportable.
But few people at any given time are getting a tetanus shot. OTOH, the line for COVID shots was wrapped completely around city blocks for weeks in many places. That's a lot of people who will potentially have their city bus related death reported. So the spike in reported deaths is meaningless.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cmdrklarg on Monday January 02, @03:48PM (2 children)
That is incorrect. If anything, COVID vaccines had *more* testing than normal, due to a large number of volunteers. They went through the 3 phases just like all other vaccines.
What was rushed was when they started production. Normally, vaccines don't begin the production phase until well after Phase 3 is completed, as you don't want to mass produce a vaccine that isn't going to work, mainly due to funding and cost. With COVID, production was started ASAP, before testing was completed with the hope that the vaccine would be viable and ready to deploy quickly, as funding was available for such measures.
Malaria and TB are big targets for sure, but expect any mRNA vaccines for either to take the normal amount of time to begin production.
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday January 02, @08:35PM (1 child)
IIRC, that's not the way Derek Lowe reported it. He said they took shortcuts in the testing (though I forget exactly which of his articles I've referring to). But that they were reasonable.
OTOH, by now there has been sufficient testing that any quibbles are foolish. But when the vaccines were first rolled out there were several "rare events" that needed to be dealt with. They weren't serious with treatment, and usually not without treatment, but they weren't detected ahead of time. (OTOH, at least some of them were rare enough that a phase 3 study couldn't reliably detect them, so my memory may have things mixed up.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday January 02, @10:42PM
That jibes with my understanding as well. I was not aware of any shortcuts in the testing phases, just that they started mass production before they were known to be viable.
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 01, @07:50PM (26 children)
>I can't wait to see all of this backtracking that mRNA vaccines are bad happens
The people doing all the bashing won't be doing any backtracking.
Strangely, I find myself agreeing with them for my personal situation: risk of the new vaccines (with the politically charged handling of its initial safety data) simply isn't low enough, for me, to make the (again. politically influenced) benefits worth it.
When HPV vaccines were mandated for all Texas schoolgirls above the age of something like 13, for all the wrong reasons, before any safety or effectiveness data had been done on any significant population of minors of either sex, I was ready to impeach and imprison the Governor of Texas for signing that. Now, the data backs up his risky move. Does that make him a hero? No. That makes him, and millions of young girls, lucky, and I don't want to participate in these games of "I know what the outcome will be before anybody even does the study." Not me, personally. You want to sign up for that? Go right ahead, I'll make the popcorn.
I still believe Governor what's his face should be barred from holding any public office and otherwise penalized for his breach of the public trust for his own private enrichment, regardless of how wonderful the HPV vaccine results have turned out to be.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, @01:47AM (25 children)
The HPV vaccine had been used in Australia for many years before the Texas mandate. It had almost zero side effects and was very effective at preventing cervical cancer in young women.
The Texas problem was a bunch of religious nutjobs who think that preventing VD is the same as promoting sex for their pure precious little girls.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 03, @01:21AM (24 children)
Plenty of religious nut jobs in Texas
Our news mentioned Nothing about vaccine testing on children, you know: little girls whose parts are still developing, in Australia or otherwise.
There is a huge difference between no side effects on adults and no side effects on growing bodies, brains, etc.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04, @11:37AM
In Australia it is given in early high school. Ages 12 to 14.
When it rolled out it was also given to older girls and young women too, but now they are all expected to have already had it. If they somehow missed it or emigrated here from a backwards religious region they can still get it at a doctor's office. You really need to give the vaccine before they become sexually active and start spreading HPV everywhere.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday January 05, @04:01AM (22 children)
The news is a terrible source of information. It wasn't just being tested in Australia, it was in common use in preteens.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 05, @01:26PM (21 children)
In common use in preteens in 2006?
How long does it take for developmental side effects to be detected?
How long was thalidomide used before they figured out what it was doing?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday January 05, @06:12PM (20 children)
Early 2007 actually.
No vaccine has EVER been shown to have developmental side-effects. For vaccines, if you don't have a bad reaction for the next 20-30 minutes, you're good.
For thalidomide, it was 8 years. BUT that was under much looser testing from the '50s. It's been made more rigorous since then, in part because of thalidomide. But note it was never approved by the FDA for any use. There was also a very narrow window in fetal development where it could cause it's devastating effects, which is probably why it was missed in testing. Now, agencies around the world are a lot more careful about use of anything during pregnancy, including nicotine and alcohol.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 05, @08:06PM (19 children)
So, I can say with certainty (because we left Texas in June of 2006) that the then governor of Texas was in the final stages of approving a mandate for all Texas schoolgirls aged something like 13 and up to require the HPV vaccination for attendance of school in 2007.
>For vaccines, if you don't have a bad reaction for the next 20-30 minutes, you're good.
Contrary to my (apparently common) experience with the tetanus jab which brought on severe stiffness and muscle pain for a couple of days starting maybe 12-18 hours after administration.
>There was also a very narrow window in fetal development where it could cause it's devastating effects
While pregnancy is a crucial and vulnerable developmental phase, bodies continue to grow and significantly mature throughout childhood - some brain structures don't really settle down until the mid 20s. For a HPV vaccine, I would be particularly concerned with effects on the cervix that may be brought on by the vaccine analagous to the effects brought on by the virus, but... it's never the things you're looking for that turn out to be the big surprises.
The HPV mandate in Texas wasn't "in our area of direct concern" since we have younger boys, were leaving Texas then anyway, etc. but I do remember nothing but bad surrounding the issue, starting with motivations which were demonstrated with credible evidence to be "pay for play" - the vaccine manufacturer directly paid the Governor significant sums just before he pushed the mandate through.
If you remember 2006, this was also about the time that they finally got around to _actually_ removing mercury from all the vaccines (at least all those delivered in the US). It was a period of reversals where for the previous 10 years there was increasing clamor about: 1) the quantity of bio-available mercury actually being delivered by injection to all children (far more than recommended safe limits per kg per year for adults, plus the added fun of being poorly controlled and highly variable, so some kids would get 10x as much preservative in their injection as others), 2) the complete un-necessity of it (just then finally being demonstrated by the removal of it), 3) parallel arguments in the dental industry about the "absolute safety" of mercury amalgam fillings which were - around 2006 - morphing into a budding industry of "safe mercury filling removal procedures" which were then being highly recommended by the same clowns that were saying the fillings were "absolutely safe" just a few years earlier, 4) Wakefield hadn't been completely blown up with "hard evidence" yet, just a bunch of ranting indignation that the impact of his conclusions are outrageous so he _must_ be wrong (lo and behold, they proved that eventually, but at the time the anti-Wakeman "evidence" being presented was even flimsier than Wakeman's own data) 5) it seemed from new parents' perspective like there was a new vaccine added to the recommended childhood schedule every couple of years, and for increasingly flimsy reasons 6) Texas had a mandated HepC vaccine for 2 year olds, which: the night after administration our oldest developed a fever (as measured at the Emergency Room) of 108, which we were able to control down to 105 with alternating doses of Tylenol and Motrin (have you seen the bruhaha surrounding Tylenol lately?) but the 105 fever persisted for over 10 days still. Otherwise, before and since he has been a generally exceptionally healthy child, but of course there's no "proof" that that vaccine caused that reaction, which only brings the entire vaccine injury database into extreme question in my mind...
/rant off...
>Now, agencies around the world are a lot more careful about use of anything during pregnancy, including nicotine and alcohol.
And anti-depressants, though I have seen numerous arguments that the unborn child may well never be born if the mother suicides due to lack of access to anti-depressants, but... there are some darkly logical counter-arguments to that one...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday January 05, @09:10PM (18 children)
The parts of HPV that set up a predisposition to cancer are intrinsic to long term infection by the virus, not the immune reaction (which will be transient in the case of a vaccine). That's why HPV predisposes a girl to cervical cancer but the flu doesn't.
Every one of us got vaccinated with vaccines containing mercury.
Muscle stiffness is not characterized as a severe reaction. Certainly it doesn't threaten life or long term well-being or require treatment. Many actual diseases cause muscle and joint pain due to the immune reaction.
Your oldest clearly did have a serious fever which MIGHT be vaccine related. But then small children tend to run serious fevers in general a lot more than tweens do. On the bright side, that was managed and now he is a lot less likely to die young from a chronic and difficult to treat HepC infection.
As for crooked politicians, that's a common problem and Texas seems to have more than it's share (everything bigger?).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 05, @09:21PM
>Every one of us got vaccinated with vaccines containing mercury.
Yes, and some of us grew up with symptoms associated with mercury toxicity - it's not immediately lethal, it's far more insidious than that.
>On the bright side, that was managed and now he is a lot less likely to die young from a chronic and difficult to treat HepC infection.
On the darker side, he has profound Autism and at age 21 we're now trying to find him a group home. Did the event influence the severity of his Autism? Certainly I lack proof...
>As for crooked politicians, that's a common problem and Texas seems to have more than it's share (everything bigger?).
Yep, and just because their crooked ways are aiding and abetting an accelerated rollout of vaccines before commonly required safety trials have been conducted is certainly no reason to defend them.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 05, @09:25PM (16 children)
>The parts of HPV that set up a predisposition to cancer are intrinsic to long term infection by the virus, not the immune reaction
You're being logically scientific, like the approvers of Thalidomide. We don't know what we don't know, and that's the point. Whatever your life experience has taught you, it is insufficient to predict the possible individual long term effects of basically anything when applied to a population of Billions.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday January 05, @10:06PM (15 children)
The approvers of thalidomide were hasty and sloppy. The logical and thoughtful ones held off for a bit. A good compromise would have been to withhold approval for pregnant women.
The really thoughtful ones are stioll using thalidomide and derivatives to treat serious medical conditions while making sure the patients do not get pregnant.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 05, @10:42PM (14 children)
They are practicing medicine, and I thank them for their service, but if you choose to submit to their care remember that they are just practicing, and they get it wrong a significant percentage of the time.
Contrasted with global health initiatives applied to billions of people in all kinds of states and circumstances, practicing individual medicine is relatively simple and predictable.
One example of sort of adequate precautions being taken: our pediatrician participated in the development of baby formula including antibodies such as are found in breast milk, this was around 25 years ago. Never heard of it? That's because shortly into the first trial over half the babies began bleeding uncontrollably, like haemophilia, and of course the trial was stopped. I say sort of because they went to human trials too quickly without adequate animal studies, and worse, they dropped study of the whole idea like a hot potato without follow up to find out why the problem happened.
Luckily, the haemophilia like symptoms reversed soon after discontinuation of feeding the experimental formula stopped.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday January 06, @02:33AM (13 children)
To be fair, many treatments that affect the immune system are hard to study in animals because they have different antigens and different receptors.
That said, yes that study went very wrong and they were right to terminate it. The various vaccines including HPV and COVID went through similar trials and passed.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 06, @03:05AM (12 children)
These are relatively immediate effects we're catching, and kudos, I'd be really pissed as a parent if the grocery store stocked baby formula that had such a high chance of making my baby bleed like a spawn of Queen Victoria.
Once released from clinical trials into larger population (like, say, all schoolgirls in Texas) there may be smaller sub-populations with reactions not noted in the clinical trials. FDA has stepped up post-market surveillance requirements, but like much of FDA regulation it's still relatively weak sauce relying on industry self-regulation to "do the right thing."
I'd counter the "once you've gotten 15-20 minutes past the vaccine injection, you're in the clear" statement with: "we don't really have enough good quality data to know what vaccines are doing much past 15-20 minutes post injection."
Modern life is great, I'd really hate having to live in an 1800s home dealing with outdoor plumbing, insect bites in the night, etc. I'd also really like to do my little part to steer society away from too many Teflon episodes where the negative consequences of a technology far outweigh the benefits to basically everyone but the shareholders of the producers and the people they pay off to keep the gravy train rolling. Having two sons in their 20s with Autism, one severely profound, and one who looks likely to need life long assistance to navigate normal society, I may be a little touchy about things we don't currently understand which have profound negative effects on peoples' quality of life.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday January 06, @03:55PM (11 children)
I can certainly sympathize with wanting to avoid various technological mistakes, particularly the hard to reverse ones.
I am not so resistant to vaccines largely because they derive their effect by stimulating the natural immune system very much in the way the actual disease would but with less risk of the actual illness. The first development there was variolation, actually inducing a (hopefully) mild case of the disease in hopes of avoiding a severe case later. Similarly, for a long time, parents would deliberately expose their children to diseases that tend to me relatively mild if contracted in childhood in order to create immunity so they wouldn't contract the disease as adults when the consequences tended to be much larger. They make sense because unlike the by-products of teflon, you would be exposed to the disease sooner or later even if the technology never exists.
So for a current hot example, I got the COVID shot and as a result, I was exposed to the spike proteins from COVID. Had I not gotten the shot, the odds vastly favor that I would have been exposed to those same proteins due to contact with COVID itself. The alternative that wouldn't expose me to the spike protein at all was bugging out to a cabin in the woods far off the grid and never visiting the modern world again. The argument for exposure to the 'natural' protein through exposure to COVID is akin to the idea that I won't be harmed because it's all-natural arsenic.
So too would the girls in Texas eventually be exposed to all-natural HPV sooner or later. As for stats for various medical problems and fatalities following vaccination, I would like to see a study tracking the same after a cootie shot (literally circle, dot, cootie shot!). The rate would certainly be non-zero for any significant sized study.
Honestly, I find the many 'fragrances' in consumer products to be more concerning. Many of those are actually olfactory deadeners meant to stun the nerves in the olfactory bulb (in close proximity to the brain) and often see no testing whatsoever.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 06, @07:27PM (10 children)
>I am not so resistant to vaccines largely because they derive their effect by stimulating the natural immune system very much in the way the actual disease would but with less risk of the actual illness.
Up until 2006 or so, I was right there with you. Then we had our oldest solidly diagnosed with Autism and his younger brother looking likely to follow in his footsteps. Mom felt strongly about it (influenced by Wakefield) and I didn't feel strongly enough against the "stop the vaccinations now" repercussions to argue with her - except about tetanus, we all still get tetanus boosters on schedule (next one due later this year...) Meaningless correlation: the child we stopped vaccinating at age 1 is much less severely affected by Autism than the one we vaccinated through age 3 - I know, meaningless, but does absolutely nothing to convince my wife that there's _not_ a connection.
>They make sense because unlike the by-products of teflon, you would be exposed to the disease sooner or later even if the technology never exists.
One thing I think people fail to appreciate are the timescales of evolutionary adaptation at play. Teflon: 1 to 2 generations, vaccines: 3 to 4 generations, natural exposure to common diseases typically mild in childhood: thousands of generations, millions back through the evolutionary tree for the basic principles at work.
>The alternative that wouldn't expose me to the spike protein at all was bugging out to a cabin in the woods far off the grid and never visiting the modern world again.
There are also shades of grey: you can be exposed to small quantities of spike protein at long time intervals without bugging out to a cabin simply by taking social distancing, facemasks, and minimization of large group and crowd exposure seriously. There's a huge difference from getting a little spike protein now and then and attending concerts in the mosh pits three times a month, plus shopping for groceries in person daily, working in a public facing job with no precautions, etc. etc.
>So too would the girls in Texas eventually be exposed to all-natural HPV sooner or later.
Not in the minds of their God fearing parents! Hell yeah they (the parents) made "sexual mistakes" in their youth, but now they know better and they're gonna make damn sure their kids never do anything like that. /delusion filter off.
When my wife and I met, apparently I was carrying an HPV variant that she was not yet exposed to and sensitive, so about a year later we were dealing with "what to do about an 'abnormal' pap smear without health insurance" because: small employers, no included healthcare, etc. etc. This was about 1997, and while the HPV-cervical cancer connection was known at the time, it was basically dismissed as clinically useless information. We opted away from the cryofluid injection method which has a high risk of cervical incompetence, and for the low low price of about what we spent on two cars around that time, got her a hot-wire LEEP procedure resulting in a "beautifully healthy cervix" according to her surgeon after followup. Having sympathy for us as not wealthy self-pay patients, the office manager gave us a generous 10% discount and easy payment plan.
>I would like to see a study tracking the same after a cootie shot
The placebo effect has real physiological consequences, positive and negative, stronger than most pharmaceutical interventions that are in pre-consideration for clinical trials.
>I find the many 'fragrances' in consumer products to be more concerning.
It's getting worse as I get older, we have basically none of that stuff in our home - occasional scented laundry detergent for the oldest boy's clothes, but that's about it. When I encounter an artificially "scented woman" walking on a sidewalk or elsewhere it evokes a strong negative reaction all over my body. Often you can still smell them 50' after they have passed.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday January 06, @09:02PM (9 children)
Variolation (against severe smallpox) was done in the 18th century. Then Jenner showed that inoculation with cowpox was effective and much safer at the turn of the 19th century based on observations of milk maids being naturally exposed.
Older adults in the west likely got a weakened strain polio vaccine as do people in the developing world today. Since then, the west has switched to a killed virus vaccine for polio.
As for Wakefield, he was thoroughly discredited as a fraud and drummed out of the medical profession. Meanwhile, most vaccines are being re-formulated without thimerosal, not because it's known to be harmful but because we can do so practically and there are legitimate questions about using mercury compounds. Note that many of us had Mercurochrome (also mercury based) applied to our cuts and scrapes as children. It is now banned in the U.S. though some still 'smuggle' it in from Mexico.
WRT the cootie shot, never mind the placebo effect, select any large random sample of people (whether they know it or not) and follow them for a week. Some of them will have adverse medical events in that time.
I can understand that you want to know a reason for your sons' autism. That's perfectly natural. I wish them and you well and I hope you get your answers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 07, @12:01AM (5 children)
If you are going to bring up early polio vaccine rollout in the US don't forget about the small but significant number of people who contracted polio from early versions of the vaccine, oops.
>As for Wakefield, he was thoroughly discredited as a fraud and drummed out of the medical profession.
Well aware, and I genuinely believe that he was incorrect, but I have to wonder: if he was correct, would he have still been drummed out? The initial response against him was so violently opinionated and lacking in any real evidence it did make the establishment look... Immature, and not exactly trustworthy themselves.
>Mercurochrome
My grandfather kept a bottle on the bathroom counter to treat shaving razor cuts. He died of melanoma, with significant palsy diagnosed as Parkinson's but it never really progressed to full blown Parkinson's levels of tremors.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday January 07, @02:58AM (4 children)
The deaths from the polio vaccine were due to a hot batch that was not correctly manufactured. Even bottled water is unsafe if they accidentally fill the bottle with kerosene instead (or benzene like Perrier many years ago). It is one reason there is now a preference for killed vaccines or vaccines that contain only fragments of the pathogen , often synthetic such as Gardasil.
Wakefield wasn't sanctioned for being wrong, he was sanctioned for knowing systematic fraud after a series of hearings that took the better part of a year. To be right, he would have had to not be committing fraud first, which would have left the board nothing to hang him with. The evidence was there in the form of years of adverse event tracking, it just didn't have someone with a financial interest hawking it on the street corner.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of drugs out there that are probably a bad idea or way over-priced and no better than the older drugs whose only real fault was being out of patent. Plenty more where the risk/benefit is definitely worse than the older drugs they replace.
As for Mercurochrome, there isn't much evidence that it harmed anyone when used as directed, but there are other safer options out there, so it's probably for the best if those are used instead.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 07, @02:10PM (3 children)
My perspective on Wakefield is that: fraud is bad, we should disregard all evidence presented with any fraudulent basis, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the evidence with a fraudulent basis is incorrect, just suspect and not to be considered either way in a decision of what is true.
Second, the trial dragged for a year, as many trials do, but that doesn't inspire confidence on my part that the evidence presented was clear or undeniable, just that after a long period of wrangling the final decision was: guilty, and in my nearly completely uninformed opinion he probably was guilty, at least 51% chance, even considering the establishment's snap judgement and overreaction to his results.
Regarding that reaction: while I, again, feel that there is a very good (>90%) chance that the establishment is correct: Wakefield's conclusions are incorrect, their extreme bluster and obvious overconfidence in what they held up as "Settled Science, aka truths not to be questioned" really made me question their basis for those opinions, and the scientific evidence presented against Wakefield's conclusions in the first year after he became the sensation did absolutely nothing to bolster their position.
So: if the world was made up of people like me, the better reaction to Wakefield would have been: "Well, sir, that would be quite revolutionary if correct, but hang on for a year while we attempt to reproduce your results in larger and much more transparently conducted studies.". As each successively larger and very well documented study published, we could have simply shut down his following of vaccine hesitant parents with scientific evidence. Any findings of fraud or malfeasance on his part would have been incidental to the whole proceeding, dealt with appropriately as proven separately from the question of correctness of his results.
But the world isn't like me, and you will change more minds and sway more followers by breaking a completely fabricated story on Jerry Springer about Wakefield being a sexual deviant who molested his study subjects while having affairs with their married mothers - also within the realm of possibility, but a little too lowbrow for the scientific establishment to pursue. Still IMO they leaned too far in that direction to preserve any respect I have for their methods.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday January 07, @09:07PM (2 children)
OTOH, if someone clearly wants a particular outcome to a study and commits fraud, it's not unreasonable to assume that the fraud was necessary to achieve that apparent outcome. If a researcher is cagey about details of their data gathering, testing, and analysis, it's not unreasonable to strongly suspect fraud unless you have reason to suspect some other sort of medical ethics violation.
Bypassing the normal peer review to present to the lay press is also generally a red flag.
Even with that, the media was more interested in telling Wakefield's version because that is a stronger pot stirrer. Even after the finding of fraud and his denouncement in the media, adherents insisted he was correct and started using any convenient excuse or even outright fraud to dodge the vaccine.
Meanwhile, it's not like nobody ever did a study of measles or thymerisal before Wakefield came along.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 07, @10:23PM (1 child)
>If a researcher is cagey about details of their data gathering, testing, and analysis, it's not unreasonable
Fraud schmaud, transparency is always the answer, and with modern technology (not to mention the vanishing costs of both audio/video capture and storage) we should be raising the bar with respect to what constitutes a well documented high quality study. For everyone, not just those that stir the pot.
The primary driver of our vaccine reluctance wasn't any particular single item or study, it was the collective continuing expansion of vaccination with the implicit (faulty in our opinion) assumption that each additional vaccination was "all good" with no negative aspects, particularly potential cumulative negative aspects. Coupled with our children's obvious emerging challenges, that sealed the decision.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 08, @03:44PM
Though I have no children, I must admit to being taken aback by how much larger the childhood vaccination schedule is compared to when I was that age (and because they use a different polio vaccine, they don't even get the sugar cubes with the X on them :).
I'll also say that since chickenpox is included, leaving a potential added vulnerability to shingles later, the least our government could do is cost control shingles vaccines for the later years, especially since it is thought that for people who had chicken pox, periodic exposure to children who have it acts as a sort of natural immune booster.
I don't think the new vaccines are a danger, but I do wonder how necessary they actually are vs. how much they're an unfunded givaway to the manufacturer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 07, @03:51PM (2 children)
Thanks for the well wishes for the children, it's appreciated, but... we've never really been looking for a "smoking gun that caused our children's struggles." As with most things in real life, it's more a death of a thousand cuts than a single thing to blame anyway.
Of course there's the genetic pre-disposition, all up the paternal grandparent line we've got "signs" of people that would have been diagnosed Aspergers' or similar today, and the same up the maternal grandmother line, plus the maternal grandfather was plenty weird himself, but he's more of an outlier in his family. But, none of them (that anyone acknowledges, at least) were at the level of needing institutional care or lifelong intensive supports. For those born in and after the 1990s, that has changed, dramatically.
All across the board, we seem to have learned with the first child and seemingly done a little better with the second one. Most significant interventions were not bio-chemical, but social: school environments, programs with other children, etc.
One thing I do sincerely regret was listening to our Pediatrician (you know, the one with the haemopheliac symptoms in his research formula...) when he gave me a script for antibiotics to give our firstborn around 5 months of age "to get a mild fever down so we can administer these vaccines at your next visit." The antibiotic "looked wrong" to me, gritty powder in suspension, it "felt wrong" when we gave it to our child, on doctor's advice. And, significantly: it initiated a period of years of diarrhea which current research is now strongly pointing toward as significant in the whole calculus of what influences the severity of Autistic symptoms - and remember: as a developmental disease, these are symptoms that stick around for a lifetime. Yes, we tried pro-biotics, and every other thing that was supposed to help, it didn't significantly resolve until he was about 5 years old. We know, in part, because he didn't toilet train until he was 7.
As parents, especially mom was desperate to know rather than what's to blame, what can we do now and in the future to make things better. One thing that sounded crazy at the time (2004) but worked for us so we kept doing it was the gluten free diet. Its effects were very real in our firstborn, better without gluten foods, dramatically worse with them. He's not as sensitive now, but it still makes a difference. His brother doesn't seem to be sensitive at all, but mom and I have decided we are mildly sensitive to gluten, better off without than with. I also theorize that it's not really gluten, but something that commonly comes along with it in the food supply. I don't have the means, or interest really, to do more than theorize about that.
The answers we seek these days are in the mysteries of the social security program, Welfare Support Coordinators, funding for group home placement, etc. It's set up as a bureaucratic puzzle that takes years to unravel, while they change the rules as you play, but... lacking millions of independent funding, the U.S. welfare system is basically our only option for caring for our children after we are gone.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday January 09, @12:01AM (1 child)
I have heard persistent theories that problems in the gut are related. Never proven but never debunked either.
And of course, the social safety net in the U.S. leaves a great deal to be desired. I suspect it is mostly the result of political sabotage, nobody can be that incompetent unless it's on purpose.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 09, @01:56AM
The gut theories were out in woo woo land in the 1990s and they have made steady progress into mainstream reproducible and respected science since then. Our own experience primarily links things in the gut with inflammation elsewhere in the body with all kinds of negative effects when the inflammation is excessive.
The social security system seems built on layers of discouragement: social shame and stigma for merely seeking assistance, gatekeepers insulating the decision makers from benefit recipients, complex rules, requirements, procedures and protocols that the gatekeepers and decision makers seem to remain willfully ignorant of, even when issuing benefit eligibility decisions.
The longer you pursue benefits the more layers of the onion you peel back, but the process literally takes years to get to something like group home placement. Oh, there are shortcuts, like allowing "crisis level" behavior and events to move your case forward in the waiting line, but in our opinion that's a horrible thing to do to both the individual in need and not so great for the community you would unleash them on by simply stepping back and allowing nature to take it's course... "Oh, we just turned our back for a second and he slipped away unnoticed, wandered a few miles and let himself into an unlocked house..."
Despite our best efforts that has happened a half dozen times already over the years, plus a dozen more with us following in hot pursuit but unable to catch them before something eyebrow raising happened. The kids aren't violent at all, but neither do they comprehend privacy or personal space.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, @12:54AM (1 child)
The cancer therapies Moderna are developing are very interesting, and I sincerely hope they continue to improve them, but for young people the Pfizer WuFlu vaccine is a bad deal.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449 [bmj.com]
There is also evidence that the spike stabilisation they use in the Pfizer vaccine makes it persist for far longer than the 2-4 days originally claimed. The longest study was still finding systemic spike proteins after 90 days. (the end of the study, not the end of the spike proteins)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 02, @03:40AM
It's lower than that "estimate" because those young adults also spread covid with all its problems when they get infected, but not when they are vaccinated. Remember covid infection also provides "transient effectiveness against transmission" and causes more problems, such as hospitalization of people infected by said young adults, when infection happens.
What I think is ridiculous about studies like this is that if we had near universal vaccination back in mid 2021, combined with measures like separation and masking, we wouldn't have widespread covid in the population. It's very easy to speak of the impossibility of stopping covid infection when one doesn't even try.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, @11:18AM
Fact is even if you didn't inject any vaccines and just poked a hole into billions of people without injecting anything, many people would still have died as a result.
It's just that in many cases Governments have to hide the truth or even lie (e.g. say it's 100% safe) otherwise too many people wouldn't get vaccinated.
And definitely some types of vaccines were more dangerous than other vaccines for certain areas: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/canada-suspends-astrazeneca-vaccine-covid-19-1.5968657 [www.cbc.ca]
The Pfizer stuff has a risk of causing heart problems: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y [nature.com]
They say 1 in 50,000 is very low. But 1 in 50,000 is only very low for a treatment if you're only doing it for people who are already sick enough to require the treatment.
1 in 50,000 x 5 billion = giving 100,000 people heart problems.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 02, @07:01PM
The best evidence is studies with control groups and tracking, like the Phase III trials that made approval possible. Since then we've had further confirmation: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2110475 [nejm.org]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Sunday January 01, @07:46PM (1 child)
Absolutely. The MRNA technology has huge potential, but the COVID vaccines showed some problems. They were/are still worth getting, of course, but eliminating the problems will let the technology reach its full potential.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 01, @07:54PM
Like so many other medical technologies, you have to ask: what are your options?
If you have no option to avoid getting malaria, then the risks of mRNA vaccination are probably quite a bit lower than the risk of malaria infection. Go with that, study the outcomes, and get better data for future similar applications.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01, @08:40PM (40 children)
About half the time, COVID response is described as a success (like this article), and the rest of the time it is described as a massive failure. I am confused.
(Score: -1, Informative) by Wong McGregor on Monday January 02, @01:02AM (38 children)
The distribution of the evidence and the parties to this debate is far from arbitrary, such that you will rarely find both in the same place.
If you want to see the two sides to this debate, you will find the uncensored side of the debate everywhere on the censored internet (MSM, big tech, big pharma, big medical associations, big business, big labor, governments etc). In respect of this debate, soylentnews seems to have been part of this censored internet (certainly mod wise), at least for a long while, which I have always found a bit surprising given the frequent scepticism expressed here, when it comes to many other technologies.
On the other hand, for the censored side of this debate, you have to go to uncensored parts of the internet such as:
. substack
. rumble
. bitchute
. telegram
. Joe Rogan
Otherwise there are a small number of independent websites expressing this point of view:
https://flccc.net/ [flccc.net]
https://gbdeclaration.org/ [gbdeclaration.org]
https://brownstone.org/ [brownstone.org]
https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/ [geertvandenbossche.org]
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/ [childrenshealthdefense.org]
https://www.theunityproject.org/ [theunityproject.org]
Here you will find the medical scientists and doctors (the key figures probably being Drs Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, Geert vanden Bossche, Pierre Kory, but there are others) who have managed to avoid (unlike most of their peers) being cancelled. You will find, unlike the former side, they are comparatively free of conflicts of interest and address both the relevant theories and evidence at great length. These people discuss the full range of evidence (eg. pharmacovigilance database evidence) and theories (eg. those of Charles Darwin), which the former "experts" so often do not seem to have ever heard of. At this point, there are hundreds of hours of interviews with these figures which are readily accessible on the uncensored, but not the censored, internet.
You will have no doubt noted that there has never been an open debate between these two positions. This is in spite of figures like Steve Kirsch offering enormous sums to members of the uncensored side, for such a debate to occur.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire [substack.com]
This is because one side of this debate cannot allow the other side to be heard. Guess which side that is?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 02, @03:15AM (36 children)
My take is that if you don't want to get downmodded on SN, then provide serious, well-reasoned arguments. Your turn.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Wong McGregor on Monday January 02, @06:29AM (33 children)
Firstly, thank you for your very reasonable reply, indeed replies.
Secondly, the so-called anti-vax position as you call it (though note that both Malone and vanden Bossche are vaccinologists so to them such terms are very unhelpful) is just that. It is a position that I am attempting to make accessible to people. These are all grass roots organisations and there are not that many of these people given the enormous (especially financial) scale of their opponents. There is a reason why things are seemingly much the same everywhere. So yes - they all know one another and they have practically no funding so there probably isn't much to disclose. The doctors at the FLCCC for instance are hospital ICU specialists and have lost their jobs many itself during this episode.
Thirdly, I'm mainly just trying help people make up their own minds independent of all the propaganda. I've wasted enough time on this myself trying to figure out what the pros and cons are, dodging vaccine mandates etc. The problem is censorship NOT arguments. Anyone with reasonable intelligence (such as yourself) can tell who has all the evidence and arguments I'm afraid, from just comparing the two sides the debate. Just listen to them, that is really all you have to do (although obviously there is more to it than that). So, I don't really have specific arguments, unless you have specific questions.
Fourthly, you make a very good point about the absence of forums and as I said Soylentnews has been disappointing to say the least with even recent proposals of censoring precisely such views.
I have noticed this absence myself and don't really have any good answers besides the pervasive problem of an over-arching conspiracy of some sort. At the very least, there is clear evidence of regulatory capture of the so-called health authorities right across the Western world. A lengthy and now famous discussion of this in the US where this is very evident (originally on youtube - perhaps the most famous of the C-19 youtube takedowns):
https://odysee.com/howtosavetheworld:e [odysee.com]
Forums associated with big tech (eg. Reddit) tend to be censored, though I don't know how things are going there right now. Obviously, at least Twitter has improved at least somewhat lately.
What forums there are tend to be small with few members with technical sophistication and I can't claim any medical expertise myself. I'm in Australia where this problem is particularly bad as we certainly, as covid has demonstrated, have no human rights here. For now, I content myself with the Novavax Australia chat on telegram. It has no affiliation with Novavax and, funnily enough, although it is quite balanced, I've never actually seen anyone argue that any of the vaccines (including obviously Novavax) work there. I'd love to hear other suggestions for Australian forums websites/forums (I am already aware of https://joannenova.com.au/ [joannenova.com.au].
Of US sites, Peak Prosperity https://peakprosperity.com/community/ [peakprosperity.com] use to be quite good but then went private.
THE PANDEMIC OF MISTREATMENT
Since there are so many specifics, I'll just provide you with the general outline of an argument concerning what has happened. Overall, there seems to have been mainly a pandemic of mistreatment, since as the authors of Great Barrington Declaration (but also everyone else on that list) pointed out, covid was never actually been that dangerous for the vast majority of the population.
There are two very complex sides to this, the more obvious one's being:
. the suppression of medical treatments:
- wait for the vaccine.
- no outpatient treatment (eg. banning of antivirals)
- suppression of early (ie. alternative) treatments (ivermectin, HCQ etc)
- alteration of existing protocols (removal of antibiotics from pneumonia protocols).
. promotion of the C-19 vaccines and other ineffective or dangerous treatments:
- mRNA vaccines (Most directly, see the discussions of the pharmacovigilance database (eg. VAERS) results and just general mortality (eg. excess death) throughout the Western world for their immediate consequences.
- For the inevitablity of immune escape (that is, huge numbers of viral escape variants), since vaccines where never the right tool for the job, see Geert. Attempting to vaccinate one's way out of a pandemic violates most of the most basic principles of vaccinology. Also see the history of failure of these vaccines (eg. Sars 1 and ADE (antibody dependent enhancement)).
- Remdesivir as the basis for hospital care for covid which is even more dangerous than the vaccines.
- Offical antivirals (eg. Paxlovid) that are ineffective.
The high death toll (officially from covid) upon inspection seems to have been due to a pandemic of no treatment (covid outpatient and pneumonia) and mistreatment (esp. C-19 vaccines and Remdesivir). For instance, there are discussions of fraud surrounding death certificates.
Perhaps the best, although also very brutal in its details (see for instance the account of Cassidy), summation of much of the above that I can think of right now is the following:
https://rumble.com/v1o3ips-john-beaudoin-fraud-in-mass-deep-data-analysis-rising-2022-deaths-in-youth-.html [rumble.com]
Some timestamps:
14.00
John intro
23.00
The economics of torts
24.00
VAERS
25.30
Initial examples
28.00
Seasonality and climate
30.00
Finding Cassidy 7yo - attributed to covid
31.30
What are we going to discover? From 2020 to 2021 the code groupings involved changed.
35.00
Intro to the data
40.00
Contrasting 2020 with 2021
54.00
The biggest emergency is NOT the vaccine.
Acute renal failure
1.00
Remdesivir
Specific examples
1.01
Cassidy 7yo
1.04
What access a state's immunisation system would allow.
1.06
Summaries of examples
1.10
Just let me see the data!
1.13
Specifics on the examples
1.25.30
Brianna 30yo
1.17.00
Attributed to covid
1.18.00
Fraud by omission. Vax not mentioned.
1.19.00
Attribution of overdoses to covid.
1.20
Fraud in death certificates.
1.24
Everybody is doing it.
1.28
Age spectrum profiles.
By codes (condition types)
1.38.00
Average age analysis
1.39.30
The point.
1.43.00
Translation
1.46
The age spectrum profile of a disease should not dramatically change on a year boundary.
1.48
End
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Monday January 02, @08:22AM (2 children)
It was a proposal by one person, it received very limited support and was wiothdrawn. It will not be implemented.
It did not say that all negative publicity would be censored, but bizaare treatments applicable to horses being recommended without any scientific supporting evidence most certainly would be considered. Similarly, trying to link the vacine to 5G transmissions is also stupid. We pride ourselves on having an intelligent community.
Having done some very rough analysis I find that the huge majority of such comments were made by ACs who didn't even have the guts to put their name to such claims.
However, I am enjoying the discussion that you are having so please continue. I merely wanted to point out the SoylentNews position.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Wong McGregor on Monday January 02, @09:45AM
Thank you for restating the position that has always impressed me about both more nerdy websites like this one and American intellectualism in general. It just seemed incredibly out of place.
Regarding "bizaare treatments applicable to horses being recommended without any scientific supporting evidence", ivermectin, and before it HCQ, has provided a case study in how big pharma and their (captured) regulators attempt to discredit and indeed ban therapies which are likely to adversely affect their profitability by being incredibly safe, effective and cheap.
Ivermectin has many properties, perhaps the most famous being anti-parasitic. Others are being:
. antiviral
. anti-inflammatory (The inflammatory response to the spike protein is how most people die from covid. Note the mRNA vaccines turn your cells into factories producing much the same toxic spike protein in much greater doses than natural infection. This goes some way to explaining why these vaccines, by contrast, have proven to be so dangerous.)
. exceedingly save, unlike many of the (particularly offical) treatments for covid that I listed above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATiX0-2PEr4 [youtube.com]
Its most important property in the context of the covid pandemic (like its precusor and rival HCQ) is that has been used for decades (especially in Africa, which is the continent which has clearly had the least problems with covid) and so is out of patent and so an off-label drug. This means anyone can make it, which makes it a clear competitor to big pharma's regulatorily protected products. Working in a highly regulated and so controlled market place means that big pharma is not particularly use to competition from therapies that cost only a few cents.
Dr Pierre Kory has been the leading proponent of the use of ivermectin for covid. He was also one of the first to recognise the essential role of regulatory capture (eg. all manner of regulatory games) in the official response to its use against covid. You might want to check out his substack:
https://substack.com/profile/31671068-pierre-kory-md-mpa [substack.com]
In Australia, ivermectin has been and still is banned as a therapy for covid. Check out the ridiculous arguments (basically little more than an argument from authority referencing other corrupt health authorities (eg. FDA, WHO)) for doing this on the TGA's website:
https://www.tga.gov.au/news/media-releases/new-restrictions-prescribing-ivermectin-covid-19 [tga.gov.au]
This is why people purchase horse wormer (3 brands are available in Oz) and why it is on the protocols (eg. FLCCC). In New Zealand, there are no pure ivermectin horse wormers and one cannot even import them without their being intercepted by customs. Countries like Australia and NZ have become medical tyrannies and yet much of Europe is probably even worse.
To all the people saying that they wanted someone with remarkable authority (and who is that on this forum? Runaway?) to say these things (like the comment below this one), what happened to just listening to people to see whether their arguments and evidence make any sense? The doctors (academic and medical) who I have listed are quite remarkable people. Just listen to them and appreciate how much they have been attacked for saying what they are saying which is basically what the science said all along.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 02, @07:40PM
Don't get me wrong, I'm not agreeing with or defending the nuts, but before the conclusive studies weren't there some preliminary apparently positive results? Again, don't get me wrong, the history of medicine is a graveyard of preliminary apparently positive results.
My feedback, if you're interested, is that stupid comments can be handled by moderation, but comments designed to make others stupider are better deleted. I respect the opposite point of view of not deleting things -- it has after all been field proven.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03, @01:57AM (1 child)
Thanks for posting an alternative view -- despite the expected groupthink downmods.
More links to add to your pile, starting with one about Australia:
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/12/20/top-australian-doctor-reveals-she-is-vaccine-injured-and-says-doctors-are-being-censored/ [dailysceptic.org]
"Former Australian federal MP Dr. Kerryn Phelps has revealed she and her wife both suffered serious and ongoing injures from Covid vaccines, while suggesting the true rate of adverse events is far higher than acknowledged due to under-reporting and “threats” from medical regulators.
In an explosive submission to Parliament’s Long Covid inquiry, the former Australian Medical Association (AMA) president has broken her silence about the “devastating” experience — emerging as the most prominent public health figure in the country to speak up about the taboo subject.
“This is an issue that I have witnessed first-hand with my wife who suffered a severe neurological reaction to her first Pfizer vaccine within minutes, including burning face and gums, paraesethesiae, and numb hands and feet, while under observation by myself, another doctor and a registered nurse at the time of immunisation,” the 65-year-old said.""
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/cleveland-study-conducted-to-demonstrate [eugyppius.com]
"Cleveland study conducted to demonstrate the clinical effectiveness of the bivalent vaccines accidentally finds that the risk of Covid-19 infection increases with each prior vaccination"
Hoping someone debunks these suggestions soon:
https://www.rintrah.nl/the-trainwreck-of-all-trainwrecks-billions-of-people-stuck-with-a-broken-immune-response/ [rintrah.nl]
"After mRNA vaccination the immune response against Spike is shifting to IgG4, which is how your body responds after repeat exposure to stuff it needs to tolerate, like bee venom, pollen or peanut proteins. ... In other words: A homogeneous population-wide shift towards IgG4 for certain antibodies, can end up impacting our relationship to respiratory viruses other than SARS2 as well. You could expect for example, that vaccinated people may become better asymptomatic spreaders of other respiratory viruses, like RSV. We see evidence of cross-reactive antibodies between SARS2 and the human corona viruses. Do you want those to switch from IgG3 to IgG4? Probably not. It seems a plausible hypothesis worth investigating to me, that the massive surge in RSV that Western nations are seeing, is a consequence of vaccinated adults now beginning to tolerate RSV, thus leading to a jump in infections in children, as they’re exposed to it more often. With children now getting these infections from vaccinated adults rather than from other children, the infectious dose they receive will tend to be higher. This could be sufficient to explain the higher virulence observed in children."
And if that was not bad enough, there are even worse claimed implications I hope someone debunks:
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/booster-caused-immune-tolerance-explains [substack.com]
"This “taking months to develop” is a biological time bomb placed into the immune systems of boosted people! It takes the germinal centers months after the third injection to switch to the useless IgG4. Therefore, many months after the booster dose, a Covid infection is met with worthless, forgiving, and disease-ignoring IgG4 antibodies. The infection seems mild; the virus replicates unopposed due to the IgG4 switch; the cardiovascular system is damaged; the risk of sudden death multiplies! A while ago, I asked: why does the strength of the statistical association between vaccines and excess deaths increase over time? Immune tolerance developing MONTHS after booster shots perfectly explains the strange delayed effect seen in excess mortality - and why vaccination rates explain more and more excess deaths as time passes. What have we done?"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Wong McGregor on Tuesday January 03, @03:14AM
Thanks. You must be the Anonymous Coward that Janrinok tried to warn me about, posting too much factual evidence and reasoned interpretation and analysis to be worth paying any attention to. It's good to see someone posting Igor and the others. Perhaps you could also ask them to present some evidence supporting their claims.
What was the point again of posting under one's name (not that this is my name obviously enough, more of an identity), if it just means that one is automatically downmoded for having a history of posting factual and reasoned content on covid?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday January 03, @04:35AM (27 children)
Searching through my previous posts on the matter, I found this gem [soylentnews.org]. It describes a summary story about multiple, large studies that found substantial decline in hospitalization rates due to vaccination.
If you really were sincerely looking through actual evidence rather than parroting propaganda sources for years, sooner or later you would have run into real studies like what are referred to here, and seen that huge difference, factor of 5 to 10 in hospitalization rates. And come up with conclusions similar to what I posted above. I'll note that there is no similar reduction in hospitalization rates for the anti-virals you favor.
(Score: 0) by Wong McGregor on Tuesday January 03, @11:23AM (26 children)
Thanks khallow for providing some evidence. Indeed, you seem to have attempted to provide more evidence than the original story on SN.
Firstly, it is isn't necessarily part of the censored position to deny some benefits to the vaccines, particularly if one ignores the broader context and focuses exclusively upon particular aspects of the broader picture. This is, after all, how, on this view, these vaccines have been sold, by using such abstraction to present them in a favourable light. The claim tends to be that any such protection, in most cases, will not provide a net benefit and, moreover, is likely to be inherently transitory.
So, for instance, the response to the claim concerning protection from hospitalisations is along the following lines. There may be some (probably not a lot) of benefit in this respect currently. This will usually be outweighed by the associated risks, stemming from vaccination itself. That is, vaccination is usually assumed to be safe and effective, but this is precisely the question at issue.
Since protection from hospitalisation will tend to make covid asymptomatic, this will only increase its spread by making people unaware what they are doing. Moreover, the evidence regarding omicron is that the more vaccinated you are the more likely you are to be infected by it due to ADE (antibody dependent enhancement). If the virus can replicate, then it can evolve and so evolve to overcome this particular protection (against symptoms and so hospitalisation), so it is inherently transitory. Eventually, since mass vaccination has destroyed any prospect of herd immunity, the increasing infectious pressure will see the hospital system overwhelmed by the vaccinated and so collapse.
The problem is actually a dynamic rather than a static one. This is why Geert in particular argues that such isolated and atemporal claims and the policy of mass vaccination in general are very short sighted and so ultimately insane. Geert appeals not just to observation but the underlying science and so claims that this policy is certainly not one supported by the science of vaccinology taken in a broad sense.
Often the abstractions used to sell the vaccines are statistical ones and I guess this brings us to the question of questionable nature of so much the statistical and other data around covid. I don't have a great deal of time to criticise these specific claims. One can find plenty of them in the comments to the original article in Reason. It is difficult to know what these ratios mean without some account of what they are and so how they were derived, the data sources etc. Many of the comments say something like this and given all the weird and completely unintuitive definitions deployed since covid, the data mentioned in the article seem simply too abstract to comment on. For instance, one really has to know very basic things like what their definition of unvaccinated is.
The following is a very good discussion of the games being played with covid statistics from el gato malo that motivates this sort of stance:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/why-vaccinated-covid-deathshospitalizations [substack.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday January 03, @02:18PM (25 children)
And yet, we still have a huge reduction in hospitalization that was roundly ignored here. That is a huge benefit contrary to dismissal.
Second, we don't actually have serious risks from vaccination. Funny how the talk of vaccination ignores that most of the risks of vaccination are worse for actual covid. To be blunt, you're hoping that natural vaccination via infection will have better outcome than artificial vaccination via medicine. Well, that massive increase in hospitalization is one of the obvious signs that there's something wrong with the scheme. I guess it's routine to ignore the week of illness that often associates itself with natural vaccination but not artificial vaccination?
As to the virus evolving, why would it evolve in the way you allege? It still has evolutionary pressure towards less harmful infection, right? Else why shouldn't we be worried that it'll evolve to a more harmful form under natural vaccination? This seems a lot like one of the logical flaws behind Pascal's wager where one form of paradise is assumed as the only possible infinite good and the other rival exclusionary infinite goods are ignored. Contrary to assertion, it remains that the same evolutionary pressure exists as long as covid continues to spread. That leads to the huge "if the virus can replicate". If it can't replicate, say because the developed world has vaccinated properly and engaged in widespread isolation policy, then evolution no longer applies at all!
Finally, the vaccinations are dynamic too. We already know they're temporary, and thus, we can continue to modify them to adjust to new variants of covid. Remember that covid already would evolve to get around existing natural vaccination immunity for the same reasons. You would still need to be reinfected on a regular basis in order to maintain resistance to infection!
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Wednesday January 04, @01:40PM (21 children)
Well, you are certainly asking all the right questions. This will be rather long, indeed it looks like I will have to break it into parts, as I have attempted to address most of the questions/points you have raised. We just have to zoom out somewhat so as to not get too hung up on the details at this point. Let me put it this way - these are not just two alternative responses to the pandemic, they are diametrically opposed ones.
As Brett Weinstein has said a number of times now, this could not merely be a matter of the incompetence of health authorities everywhere, as it is simply too uniform, pervasive and symmetrical. Everywhere (except for Africa, where they have met Gates before and so told him where he could shove his vaccines, and perhaps Sweden) they have done the exact opposite of what would have been recommended by the western tradition in science and medical ethics only months before. Australia published a pandemic plan only months (August 2019) before the Covid pandemic which involved many medical scientists and all the governments of Australia. Do you think that they followed it?
Sure, but in the context of a global conspiracy, do we really know that? Somewhere in the John Beaudoin interview I posted above, he said he only trusts mortality data as it is the most difficult to game, and indeed, he does, even then, discuss widespread fraud in relation to death certificates. My first degree was in economics. I don't tend to understand the news media as so much about the communication of truths, as being motivated by the aim at selling products and pushing agendas. We all know what the product of the day is.
There are literally endless substack articles, like the el gato malo one I referenced above, discussing the ways our so-called health authorities have attempted to game the data surrounding covid. Here's one about the medical anthorities in the state I live in in Australia and they are the only state that publishes such data in Australia.
https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/the-disinformation-commissioner [substack.com]
To quote one of the commentors on the article in Reason:
Indeed, consider the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a global agreement amoungst news organisations, which generalises these problems to a global scale:
https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative-vaccine-disinformation [bbc.com]
https://www.bbc.com/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/ [bbc.com]
To be continued ...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday January 05, @05:52AM (20 children)
In other words, he can't rule out that he's just spinning tales. When reality is consistently not in your favor, it's not reality that's wrong.
Yes. Here's the plan. [health.gov.au] Looks like they followed it to a great degree. Keep in mind that much of it is bureaucratic activity: setting up communication channels - who reports to who, when to determine there's an pandemic, etc.
You definitely brought it in your four ample replies. But here's the thing. You don't acknowledge that natural resistance acquired from infection is not that different from vaccination evolution-wise and it is quite temporary too; a continued refusal to compare like to like (side effects of the vaccine versus the much more serious side effects of covid infection); the importance of reducing hospitalization - even short term reduction has big long term consequences like less people dying overall; the overemphasis on treatment rather than prevention (not getting covid at all is vastly better than weak treatments with anti-virals and such); peculiar concepts that are clearly poorly thought out (herd immunity by getting people sick rather than by vaccination has the problem that you made a bunch of people sick and the disease is still evolving to overcome that resistance, original antigenic sin which just is broken on basic principles - how then does the human body ever get past the first infection of any kind that it receives?); repeatedly asserting something doesn't work without evidence - saying it authoritatively isn't evidence; spinning tales of conspiracy (Q: how can I know that hospitalization was down in the face of some nebulous, powerful global conspiracy? A: because the hospitals weren't packed full which I can observe despite the conspiracy and personal experience with anti-vaxxers in my family and workplace who keep getting bad cases of covid, sometimes repeatedly! And the nefarious alleged contribution of Bill Gates!); and the final tell - you talk a lot about the alleged flaws and short comings of the establishment institutions and their claims, but never show that those claims are wrong - sometimes never actually saying that they are wrong.
On the conspiracy point which I htink particularly silly, consider the Brett Weinstein quote above. He's spinning this great tale of "uniform, pervasive and symmetrical" incompetence which he doesn't think is so, for some reason. A lot of the flaws in that narrative (and your related one) is the ridiculous contrast of a hypercompetent conspiracy making utterly noob mistakes. Another big flaw is that there's no point to creating the crisis in the first place (well, assuming said hypercompetent conspiracy). It's far more harmful than any marginal advantage to control that could be gained. But if one sees it as some opportunist politicians making sure a crisis doesn't go to waste, then their actions make a lot of sense as does their subsequent flailing about and naked hypocrisy.
I have come to the point of view that covid may well be man-made, but if so, I think it would be an accidental release. China has no percentage in creating and deliberately releasing a disease that is so dangerous to their own society. The slow start to the disease also is consistent with a point origin such as an infected individual getting out and spreading covid a few times.
Ultimately, I see two factors that are important. First, it may have been implemented poorly, but isolation and vaccination does work and we have plenty of evidence of that (along with various dysfunctional behavior like repeatedly opening society when infection drops somewhat, resulting in a long term infection level). Second, there's not much point to protecting your rights, if you refuse to act responsibly in the face of a threat to society. I see here mere opposition not a better approach. Worse, I strongly suspect that if government has done something different, then you would have different beliefs and alleged facts to justify why you diametrically oppose what they are doing.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Friday January 06, @03:29PM (14 children)
Part 1 of 2
Thanks. I think that we have reached a certain amount of agreement as much as we continue to disagree on many things.
It didn't recommend lockdowns, masking or mass vaccination programs. That all came from the WHO.
I think we can both agree on the importance of this contrast between treatment and prevention. Clearly, we have very different (really, as I indicated, diametrically opposed) views on this and these are the different views that underpin the these two positions, their motivations and respective outlooks on the future.
I'm afraid that the medical scientists that I have referenced do hold the view that mild disease, as is typically the case with covid, is nothing to be overly concerned about, particularly as it brings with it very durable and broad natural immunity. They also encourage the naturally immune to not isolate and to stay in touch with the virus to keep their immune response up to date as it can track the virus' development.
Vaccination, on the other hand, with these vaccines brings with it far greater risks. Firstly, there are those arising directly from the vaccine such as cardiac injury (esp. myocarditis and pericarditis), cancer and infertility. Particularly young people (eg. children) face practically no risk from covid and yet face the risk of permanent cardiac injury from the vaccine. I have already explained this greater risks from the vaccine in earlier posts. Natural covid infection does not involve lipid nanoparticles and typically involves far lower exposure to spike protein than vaccination.
Secondly, there are the immune escape risks arising from the poor levels of immunity that they provide as discussed in former posts, which are likely to be very durable and so long lasting (due to OAS).
While the reinfection of the naturally immune is possible, it is much less likely that the vaccinated due this deficiency in the immunity provided vaccines in general and these vaccines in particular. For instance, the naturally immune could be infected by both the delta and omicron variants, this amounts to just two infections.
The vaccinated, on the other hand, are more likely to be infected due to the comparatively poor level of immunity provided by the vaccines (since it is narrow and out of date). Moreover, the adaptation of the virus to the antibodies present in the vaccinated means that this vulnerability of the vaccinated will continue to develop over time.
They then face two important immune escape risks:
. infection with a more virulent variant if one arises.
. repeated reinfection (becoming incubators for the virus and its development)
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/more-vaccination-more-reinfection [substack.com]
Natural immunity is typically sterilizing (prevents reinfection) so the unvaccinated do not act as incubators for the virus and so prevent immune escape.
Regarding hospitalisation, it was clear from comparatively early on for the censored position, that covid was not all that dangerous and that the appropriate early (outpatient) treatment when applied was very successful, with a very low casualty rate. Therefore, people could have been kept out of the hospitals by pursuing a strategy of outpatient treatment. In Australia, these treatments have been banned (on the based upon ridiculous grounds that I discussed in an earlier post) so one has to use veterinary ivermectin or other less effective protocols, though there are many at this point.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 06, @05:22PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 06, @06:07PM
One could say the same of the side effects of vaccination. I gather you'd be extremely upset if the authorities had brushed off several days of suffering and isolation as "nothing to be overly concerned about". Right now, you're proposing natural infection as an alternative to vaccination and blowing off huge side effects. If we're rationally comparing like to like, we have to acknowledge that there's a large chance of these mild disease symptoms and subsequent isolation while the ill person passes through the most infectious phase. Even afterwards, the person should mask and practice some degree of separation in order to keep from infecting others. To just dismiss that outright rather than honestly list it as a disadvantage of natural infection indicates the fundamental dishonesty of the argument.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 06, @06:47PM (11 children)
Whose direction they were planning to follow from said document. And that wasn't actually bad policy either. One of the lessons learned from the 1918 influenza pandemic was that lockdowns, etc saved lives over the course of the pandemic. There's a lot of US city case studies of that pandemic well predating the covid pandemic by decades (so they had nothing to gain from supporting today's alleged conspiracy).
The obvious rebuttal is that the "mild disease" is already a much more harmful effect than most vaccine recipients receive - multiple lost days of work, perpetuating future infections, and so on. And your medical scientists are merely hoping that there isn't long term harm from those.kild infections. There are indications long covid is a thing. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that multiple mild disease infections give a much greater likelihood of long term harm than multiple vaccinations would.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Saturday January 07, @12:20PM (10 children)
If you check where it gets its funding from you will find that the WHO is basically owned by Big Pharma, Mr Gates and the CCP.
No mass vaccination programs in the 1918 influenza pandemic. Only one variant of the virus and how long did that pandemic last for?
What they have done is compared the relative risks. It is the 'safe and effective' narrative, which makes the one sided claim that there are only risks from natural infection. This has no basis in evidence. Listen to the McCullough interview for instance. He weighs the relative risks from the two possible courses of action with their risks in terms of cardiac injury. The narrative has repeatedly understated the risks of vaccination. Indeed, one can get long covid from the vaccines.
It is pretty clear why vaccination is the more dangerous of the two routes. The spike protein is the most toxic feature of the virus and one gets far greater exposure to it from the vaccines. Indeed, as he says quite, nobody even knows when it leaves the body in the case of vaccination. It was discovered by accident, when trying to find a control group, that, months post vaccination, the vaccinated still retain spike. This is not the case in natural infection.
Moreover, natural infection leads to natural immunity which is much more likely to prevent reinfection than vaccinal immunity as discussed above.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 08, @12:28AM (9 children)
They shouldn't be allowed to help fund WHO? Convenient that you discount rival information sources without actually showing that distrust is warranted.
And you already acknowledged that they just blew off as "mild" significant risks of covid infection. As to the "one-sided" claim, the only benefit of covid infection is that it provides some level of resistance to future similar infections - it's not like you'll live longer or have shinier hair. That's a pretty lousy balance sheet. As to getting "long covid" from vaccines, you don't have evidence much less a mechanism by which it could happen.
If it's "pretty clear" then you have evidence for that danger?
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Monday January 09, @12:38PM (8 children)
As I said, they basically own them. They aren't just contributing a small but rather the largest proportions of its funding.
Only a comparatively small proportion of the population faced significant risks from covid. Hence, the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration recommended 'focused protection' targeting the vulnerable for protection. As we have seen, the vaccines are more dangerous than covid itself and a mass vaccination program was never going to work anyway. All we've done is create a huge proportion of the population now vulnerable to covid due to immune escape.
The vaccines expose vaccinees to large quantities of spike protein.
McCullough discusses the relative risks of cardiac injury from spike protein. It is largely confined to vaccinees and is very serious, since the heart has a very limited capacity to repair itself. The vaccines have exposed a much broader range of the population to such risks as, for instance, the working population faced little risk from covid and yet face considerable, risks from the vaccines. Since the vaccine rollout, their mortality has increased dramatically.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 09, @03:56PM (7 children)
Which is not ownership. Nor do I consider those groups aligned in such a way that they exert ownership.
You just did it again. "Comparatively small" is bullshit when you're speaking of the most common symptoms of the disease and key reasons why it is a problem in the first place. We have not seen that the vaccines are more dangerous. This is an ongoing empty accusation that has yet to present evidence. Given that you continue to refuse to acknowledge huge "side effects" of covid infection: namely, its routine symptoms and infectious nature, you have a faulty foundation with which to make that above claim.
Does he have evidence for that discussion?
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Tuesday January 10, @03:58PM (6 children)
I don't know where the CCP fits in but the others clearly have profound conflicts of interest.
For the majority of the population, the routine symptoms of covid are comparatively mild and not long lasting and as you have noted have declined in severity to this point. Those requiring treatment should be treated with effective (rather than the official standard) treatments.
As an academic cartiologist, he cites lots of academic studies and can do this off the top of his head. Just listen to any interview with him.
There is lots of evidence of harm from the vaccines. Thus far we have, at the least:
. pharmacovigilance databases (across Western world)
. cardiac injury and death (see Drs McCullough, Aseem Malhotra etc)
. cancer (Drs Ryan Cole, Angus Dalgleish) - see turbo cancer
. pfizer documents from phase 3 trial
. excess mortality (across Western world)
. immune escape risks (eg. reinfection, risk of more virulent variants)
Since vaccines (particularly in this case) target healthy populations, surely the onus of proof is on the vaccine manufacturers to demonstrate that their vaccines are safe, not on their critics to demonstrate that they are unsafe. Where is the safety data to indicate that the C-19 vaccines are safe? There isn't any and in many cases (medium to long term data) their simply could not be any. What safety data there is, especially that independent of the manufacturers such as that coming from the pharmacovigilance databases, indicates that these are the most dangerous vaccines ever released. And yet they are still on the market.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 11, @06:13AM (5 children)
Not compared to vaccination. Remember they're recording things like arm soreness with vaccination while you're blowing off missing several days of work as "comparatively mild".
Since you've listened to him, how about you sum that up?
A list of unevaluated data is not evidence. And perfect harmlessness is not the criteria for a useful vaccine. And given that you continue to blow off a huge source of harm from covid (as well as attributing "excess mortality" above solely to the vaccine even though covid is all over the place sucking up health care resources), I see considerable evidence that you are heavily biased here.
Here's the bare minimum. An oranges to oranges comparison of the advantages and side effects (including that of "comparatively mild" covid symptoms and need for isolation during infection). I think we'll find that covid fares poorly especially when we consider that the vaccine can't harm other people.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Sunday January 15, @11:46AM (4 children)
Well, in the grand scheme of things those things are comparatively mild and there isn't much concern for them unless they become chronic, whether they come from infection or vaccination.
The main emphasis has been on avoiding hospitalisation and death, since this is where things could get very nasty and involve very significant externalities. Moreover the real contrast is between the different lengths of outlook. One short term, the other long term.
He does a perfectly good job of summing things up himself.
The point is that the vaccines certainly haven't stopped people from dying, quite the opposite. We now have higher death tolls than before they arrived, especially if one does not ignore vaccine injuries, hence the importance of looking at all cause excess mortality.
I'm afraid mild disease is simply not their central concern, since it is both likely to be unavoidable and has the benefit, in the case of infection, of providing natural immunity. Their primary concern is for long term health outcomes and the central aim for good long term health outcomes needs to be herd immunity as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration stated. For this reason, the main aim should be to avoid short term thinking. As it turns out, what we saw was an enormous wave of corrupt medical decision making. Only very short term thinking was encouraged and supported by an organised fear campaign.
Vaccinating everyone gives rise to comparatively poor long term health outcomes as the vaccines have proven to be both dangerous in themselves and to give rise to very poor immunity (due to the inevitable immune escape). Due to the latter, it cannot be said that vaccine cannot harm other people.
When deployed in mass vaccination programs, vaccines have large population effects, and when this gives rise to immune escape, it increases the infectious pressure in populations and so undermines herd immunity. It is no accident that the most vaccinated countries (most notoriously Israel, Ireland, Portugal but also increasingly Australia and NZ) now also have the highest rates of infection. How are these countries ever going to reach herd immunity? Without it, many vulnerable people will be killed by these policies, as there will be no escaping covid, since there will be no herd immunity to protect them. In short, due to these disastrous policies, this is far from over.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 15, @03:22PM (3 children)
Keep in mind that all the side effects, even the lethal ones, of vaccination are comparatively mild too either as a symptom or frequency of occurrence. You want an honest comparison, you have to include this stuff as well as how often it happens. And the infectiousness of covid is far from "comparatively mild" since it's the whole reason the disease is a risk in the first place! I'm not going to put thousands of people at risk by vaccinating one person. But I can by adding one infection which happens to infect enough people in turn.
Indeed and this has been a place where vaccination shined. "Short term" has a long term effect of fewer people dying. Meanwhile your "long term" hasn't happened yet.
Your language remains inappropriate to your evidence! There's no reason to expect vaccines to be perfect or for perfection to be necessary in order for them to work well. And what "vaccine injuries"? Last I heard, you only found a single minor issue where vaccination was worse than natural infection. Meanwhile, I've found some really big ones where unvaccinated infection was worse.
So what? Are they going to do an honest comparison at some point or play games? Cherry picking the symptoms/side effects isn't the way.
If that's true, then you should have evidence for this. Not links, not empty assertions that there's data sources out there somewhere which support your claims, evidence. Where's your evidence?
The same is true for natural infection which also has large population effects. That's why we still have many routine infectious diseases. Herd immunity only gets you so far, if you rely on infection to provide it. And to answer your question: continued vaccination will provide that herd immunity.
And let remember that the more recent infections are less dangerous - they've already succeeded at reducing the number of deaths significantly. Maybe this is more a result of these countries just refusing to curb infections. Certainly is the case in Australia which "let it rip" [7news.com.au]. Sounds like China [bloomberg.com] did that as well.
I'm getting annoyed here because you continue to provide narratives not evidence. Anyone no matter how right or wrong can provide a story. That doesn't tell us anything useful.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Wednesday January 18, @02:09PM (2 children)
Yes. I don't think anyone believes their 95 per cent figure (which like elsewhere looks to be exaggerated). NSW is one of the least vaccinated states in Australia as it has a less left leaning government than the more tyrannical parts of Australia (although it is clearly no Florida).
This is because they continue to push vaccination, as they always have. Do you think they can turn around at this point? They withdrew the data precisely because it does not support their stance with respect to the vaccines, since there has been a clear positive correlation between vaccination and hospitalisation.
We have had such variants for a long time now. Omicron has always been clearly more infectious for the vaccinated, as it turns out, due to ADE.
The quote from NSW health says nothing about the relative propensity for infection due to differing numbers of doses, much as they have never mentioned it. If you check Igor's article, he was saying precisely this (as was Malone). The vaccinated are considerably more prone to re-infection. This is why the C-19 vaccines increase (as opposed to decreasing, as natural immunity does) the infectious pressure in populations.
And the obvious response is that these externalities have never been demonstrated. Quite the contrary. Due to their propensity for re-infection, the vaccinated are effectively incubators for the virus. There has never been any evidence that the vaccines stop infection. Many vaccinologists have pointed out that they were the wrong type of vaccine for this to even be possible.
The "mysterious injuries" were obviously vaccine injuries, but nobody is allowed to say that, much as all the people "dying suddenly" of various forms of heart failure are, but it is all somehow inexplicable when due to the vaccine.
The pandemic is "out of control" because the rate of infection continues to increase and has been for a long while now. That is, the rate of infectious pressure is out of control. Of course the politicians (and all their co-conspirators) now want to flee the scene of the crime and so pretend that nothing ever happened. So yes, they are pretending that everything is going back to normal (letting it rip as you say). If the vaccine did actually stop infection and transmission, how would this be a problem?
It sounds like you think that pandemics never end. Well, in the past they have ended, comparatively quickly, due to the infectious pressure declining with the development of herd immunity. This can't happen this time around as the vaccinated, who are a huge proportion of the population, are effectively incubators for the virus.
I've presented plenty of evidence and where people can find further evidence, if they want to be bothered to look. For the fundamentals of vaccinology, about which there seems to be the most disagreement, you might want to consult Geert.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 18, @07:20PM (1 child)
Not than people who weren't vaccinated. And sorry ADE is overrated here.
Do you have evidence that there's a real effect here?
You have a timing issue here. The "let it rip" predates the "out of control". For it to be the way of your narrative, the latter would have to precede the former!
Assert that you have evidence harder, and somehow you will? Again, where's the evidence? As to the fundamentals of vaccinology, merely referring to the word doesn't mean you have said anything relevant about it. And no I'm not going to consult Geert, I'm consulting you! There are a thousand tar babies out there demanding my time and effort. I can't devote time to even a minute fraction of them.
You indicated you read up on Geert and his evidence. So let's see it!
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Thursday January 19, @10:50AM
Clearly more infectious than for those who weren't vaccinated. After all, what everyone has been looking for are signs of ADE, and that would indicate ADE which indeed it seems to have been. Moreover that is why the MSM, governments etc do not mention these features of the virus, because they are indicative of ADE, that the vaccines are the problem rather than the solution, which Geert was saying was going to be the case back in March 2021.
This is one of the reports. As usual, Americans taking more interest in what was going on in Western Australia than Australians, because of the critical experiment being conducted there:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/11/04/something-very-weird-happening-in-western-australia-hospitals-overwhelmed-vaccinations-continue-but-they-have-no-covid/ [theconservativetreehouse.com]
"Let it rip" is a comparatively recent phenomenon here because Australia, a bit like Western Australia, was isolated from the rest of the world for much of the pandemic so sars-cov-2 has not been endemic here until comparatively recently. Especially in places like WA, the vaccination program preceded the wholesale arrival covid.
Well, where's your evidence?
Geert's first warning, which is, amazingly, still up and still holds up pretty well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJZxiNxYLpc [youtube.com]
Or his website:
https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/ [voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org]
Personally, I find him to be a better communicator in his interviews than as a writer.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Friday January 06, @03:38PM (4 children)
Part 2 of 2
OAS asserts that the first major encounter is the important one, immunity-wise. I don't know what the problem is here. Natural infection typically gives rise to something approaching sterilizing immunity (that is immunity that prevents reinfection). The problem with vaccine based exposure is that it is typically not able to do this, especially within a pandemic. The vaccined are therefore prone to reinfection and so to becoming the incubators of the virus.
I have provided evidence of how most of the statistics surrounding covid can't be trusted. It is notorious that the tests are unreliable and that the reportingis full of conflations and confusions. There is evidence of regulatory capture everywhere if one bothers to look for it, and this explains the bastardization of the statistics.
In Australia (as in other Commonwealth countries (with the possible exception of Canada (though Canada does seem to be doing as badly)), politicians are granted a ridiculous amount of power. There are practically no checks on them (besides the ballot box), so guided mainly by their own greed and popular fear, they are killing huge numbers of people. Given that they are currently being rewarded for doing this, it's very difficult to see a happy ending to this.
This is the sort of thing that the American founding fathers seem to have wisely tried to avoid, though your death toll there seems to be even higher. Americans seem to have a much greater distrust and distaste for tyrants and governments, so most of the resistance to these developments has been there. Australians have been incredibly ignorant and pathetic by contrast and I suspect will pay a high price for this going forwards.
Brett's argument against their being simply incompetent was not an argument for their being so much hyperorganised as corrupt.
I don't know that anyone is arguing for a hyperorganised conspiracy, only that parts seem to have been planned for and organised in advance. Moreover, that that course of action has had far more (especially financial) resources behind it, and so has dominated the response thus far.
For one, covid doesn't seem to have been all that dangerous, since it is quite treatable in both its viral and inflammatory phases. This was the experience of the doctors who attempted to treat it (eg. McCullough, Zelenko, Chetty etc).
So there had to be a huge scare campaign from the MSM and governments, with large numbers of people being killed by the absence of treatment and mistreatment.
The point of the crisis (if one accepts the comparatively minimal regulatory capture type of conspiracy) is that it has been hugely profitable for big pharma. But they haven't been the only beneficiaries, so has Wall Street (esp. Blackrock, Vangard etc). But given that there is increasing evidence that the US DOD seems to have been heavily involved that may well be too minimal.
I'm also inclined to favour some form of accidental release. If they were trying to cover their tracks, it would be very odd for them to intentionally release it near the lab that they would then argue it could not have originated from. I also agree that the Chinese releasing it in China is difficult to motivate.
I really can't agree with you on your last two items. Indeed, I wouldn't have taken you for a proponent of both lockdowns and woke ethics.
I tend to see lockdowns and isolation as little more than kicking the can down the road, much as the medical scientists do. They don't do anything to address the fundamental problem.
Moreover, it may well be that we haven't even begun to see the full fallout from the vaccines, as we have now, with the mass vaccination programs, effectively created a huge population who will now be vulnerable to a vaccine resistant virus for a very long period of time to come. The negative efficacy of the vaccines and so vaccine enhanced disease (ie. ADE) will only continue to develop.
Regarding putting society before individual rights, I view society as an abstraction which does not deserve such a privileged position. Information has always been slow to come out, but then they threw Western medical ethics, based as it is upon individual decision making, completely out the window, it was pretty clear to me that it had to all be motivated by removing barriers to corruption.
Since this is very much an on-going experiment, the evidence will keep coming in. Indeed, the censored people think that this is likely to be far from over.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 06, @07:16PM (3 children)
The naturally infected are also prone to reinfection. So you're not saying much here. As to OAS, we have yet to establish that it is relevant here. For example, we don't actually have variants that more strongly infect vaccinated people. Nor a pandemic, including covid, which supports the claims you made above.
You just talked about a 2019 plan in Australia and there's similar in other countries. Of course, they've planned for it.
Where I'm from, we'd call that Libertarian ethics. Part of being a free individual is to understand the consequences of your actions for others, not just your own self-interest. Being free is not free as in beer. You have to work to maintain that. And a big one is dealing decisively with threats like pandemics that can end your freedom.
Societies consist of a lot of individuals. You have a standard conflict of rights between individuals. And the problem with disease is that being irresponsible can mean a lot of other people get infected. You can generate a lot of harm. Here, there's strong evidence against covid vaccines being more harmful than a typical covid infection and that they can actually help deal with this covid pandemic. It's not a good case for hallowing independent decision because there's an obvious ethical choice for everyone who doesn't have a medical condition that precludes making the right choice.
Except of course, they do. Australia for example avoided the more lethal first wave of covid infections through its derided policies (the current wave of infections are mostly from the milder Omicron variant). And contrary to your earlier assertion [soylentnews.org], we do see the usual trend from more severe to less severe infection as in other pandemics over the same time frames.
I find it interesting that you have spun these very elaborate narratives without even confirming whether they have evidence to back them up.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Saturday January 07, @02:10PM (2 children)
The naturally immune are far less prone to reinfection. Here, they've now decided that they are no longer going to report on vaccination status because there simply haven't been any unvaccinated people in the hospitals:
We have had such variants for a long time now. Omicron has always been clearly more infectious for the vaccinated, as it turns out, due to ADE. The more doses, the more infectious it has been:
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/denmark-no-vax-is-protective-vax [substack.com]
And we have had worse outcomes, and are certainly likely to have worse outcomes going forwards, than if we had done nothing. The death toll continues to mount.
Agreed on the societies consisting of individuals bit. But 'the right choice' should be made by the individual who experiences the consequences of that choice. Otherwise one invites corruption, which we have seen in great abundance with the repeal of traditional Western medical ethics.
All they used the lockdowns to do was to vaccinate people. Now, (rather like NZ) we have a country with permanently low levels of immunity, due to the absence of natural infection. In the states where they had practically no covid (eg. WA, Tasmania), the hospitals were overwhelmed by mysterious injuries as the vaccination program rolled out long before covid even arrived.
I don't disagree that declining virulence is what we have largely seen up until this point. But now, unlike former pandemics, we have an open ended, perpetual pandemic thanks to the vaccines. This pandemic is now completely out of control and as the virus steadily overcomes the vaccinal antibodies, thereby increasing its resistance, we may well yet see more virulent variants emerge as these are likely to be more infectious.
I agree that it is all very elaborate. It is a conspiracy of some sort after all. People can consult the evidence and make up their own mind. I dare say people have well and truly formed into camps at this point and it is difficult to traverse between them as there is, for instance, no way to reverse vaccination.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 07, @04:15PM
Because completely overwhelmed hospitals are better outcome? For example, when I look at Italy or New York City early on, they were near things. No vaccine with only emergency measures saving them from a much higher death rate. No action would have been disaster. Then almost a year later the vaccines come out. That meant the difference between being a bad outbreak away from disaster and having a functioning health care system.
Sorry but when you get the past grossly wrong (this wasn't your first) I think we'd be wise to greatly discount your predictions of the future too!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 07, @11:49PM
Supposedly it's up to 95% of the population that's been vaccinated at least twice. From your first link:
And I see they're still claiming that vaccination is better than no resistance at all.
That's false as the above quote mentions. Omicron has been more infectious for vaccinated than older variants of covid, but it hasn't been more infectious to vaccinated than to those who have no exposure to disease or vaccine. And still looks like it's better hospitalization outcomes than not being vaccinated.
The obvious rebuttal is externalities. Highly infectious diseases have high externalities particularly in the early stages of the disease. To refuse to acknowledge the externality is not a right choice.
Since you couldn't be bothered to explain even slightly why that "mysterious injuries" is relevant, the first paragraph is a red herring. The second is one of those silly things we routinely get. Sure, everything has been trending down for almost three years, but it's going to suddenly reverse direction for reasons? The problem here is that we have this evidence thing and it's just not supporting your narrative.
I also wonder what in the world you think "completely out of control" means. It certainly doesn't mean swamped the Australian hospitals, right? (more due to the low hospitalization rate than to any control over number of cases) Reading along I also see there was an alleged "let it rip" [wsws.org] decision to open Australia up to covid transmission. That would go pretty far to explain the present wave of infection.
So I'm stuck. You don't have the evidence that you claim to have and there's big factors being ignored all over the place.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Wednesday January 04, @01:48PM
Part 2
Precisely. The contrast between these two courses of action all turns of the respective merits of natural versus vaccinal immunity. Moreover, since it might be argued that these two different paths of action are founded upon their respective motivations, it should not be surprising that this very contrast is also directly related to the two different motivations which might be argued to lie behind these two diametrically opposed courses of action. And, indeed, the whole question of motivation then raises the issue of what are the fundamental principles of ethics underlying them.
On the one hand, traditional Western medical ethics argues that the best health outcomes will be the result of free individual, informed choice. On the other hand, the new (financial) consensus argues for the coercise mandating of experimental medical procedures upon a misinformed public by a likewise misinformed and coerced medical profession, who were amongst the first to mandated for the same medical procedures as their patients will lead to the best financial outcomes for those who own the manufacturers of the products used in these procedures (eg. Gates et al). That is, one could argue that this new (financial) concensus is motivated by its aim at the 'best' financial outcomes. In Australia, doctors can lose their medical licence for merely comparing different vaccines with one another.
In many parts of the world, the recognition of natural immunity is the biggest elephant in the room for which there is typically no official explanation whatsoever. Indeed, in the same parts the world (such as Australia) although reporting of testing for infection has been mandatory (potentially punishable by huge fines and even jail time), in those same parts of the world (such as Australia), testing for natural immunity is often highly discouraged and granted no recognition whatsoever.
One needs to understand that all these censored people (either explicitly or implicitly) share a largely common general view of the appropriate response to covid which was articulated in The Great Barrington (Sept 2020) which is just one page long. It is also not very polemical which makes it a bit cryptic.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand this position is as entirely consistent with, indeed, as an expression of the fundamental principles of Western medical ethics and science.
The following is a very nice, brief (30 minute) interview with its authors:
Dissenting scientists issue Covid-19 herd immunity declaration - Unherd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz_Z7Gf1aRE [youtube.com]
The central notion here is clearly that of herd immunity. Herd immunity is closely related to natural immunity. For instance, Geert has said that if someone was to ask him how to eliminate the possibility herd immunity, he would advise them to vaccinate everyone, hence his opposition to mass vaccination programs especially within a pandemic. Herd immunity is how pandemics come to an end and so the natural aim for a response aiming at superior health outcomes, yet now what we have the prospect of is a perpetual pandemic with no end in sight.
This is because natural immunity is, in most cases, vastly superior to vaccinal immunity. Although no current vaccine has ever effectively stopped viral transmission during a pandemic, natural immunity can do this. There is a huge literature supporting the superiority of natural immunity:
https://brownstone.org/articles/79-research-studies-affirm-naturally-acquired-immunity-to-covid-19-documented-linked-and-quoted/ [brownstone.org]
Why might this be the case? The C-19 vaccines provide a very precise but also therefore narrow and comparatively easily evaded immunity, based upon a single protein of a virus which consists of about 30 proteins. Due to the time they take to develop, they are also inherently out of date compared to natural infection. The current range of C-19 vaccines centre on just one aspect of a now extinct variant of the C-19 virus. Moreover, vaccines are simply the wrong tool for the job, unless their only function is to raise revenue, since they are not treatments but prophylactic (preventative). Using them as treatments simply provides ideal conditions for immune escape and so the promotion of resistance to the vaccine in question.
Regarding the scale of the dangers of vaccination particularly see analysis and interpretation the pharmacovigilance databases which lit up around the world like christmas trees when the C-19 vaccines were rolled out (eg. search for "VAERS hockystick"). Interpretation is especially required because these passive databases massively under-report (eg. in the case of the most observable adverse event, VAERS has been estimated to under-report by a factor of 42 fold) and also suffer from a bias towards short term events.
As an introduction to the sources of these dangers, I will quoting myself from a post above, on some possible reasons why the C-19 vaccines have proven to be especially dangerous:
The mRNA vaccines are very different to traditional vaccines. The incorporation of lipid nanoparticles mean that they do not stay in the site of injection, but rather travel around the body, in particular to the major organs. They turn the bodies cells into spike protein factories, exposing the body to far higher and largely uncontrolled levels of spike protein. The spike protein is the most toxic part of the virus. Hence, unlike traditional vaccines, they create inflammation in the major organs. This is most obvious from the cardiac injuries that vaccinees can sustain, since these injuries can lead to heart failure and death. These injuries also do not seem to be very "rare" as medical authorities have attempted to claim. Nor are they, quite obviously, "mild", as they have also attempted to claim, since they frequently lead to hospitalisation and, indeed, death. Some studies have found incidences of cardiac injury greater than 1 in 100:
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/horrifying-thai-study-finds-evidence?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email [eugyppius.com]
For a comparison of the risk of myocarditis from natural infection verses the vaccines see this hour long interview with Dr Peter McCullough:
https://thehighwire.com/videos/dr-peter-mccullough-battling-the-covid-cabal/ [thehighwire.com]
Dr Peter McCullough, apart from being a leading exponent of early treatment for covid (esp. early and current advocate for HCQ), is a highly distinguished academic and clinical cardiologist. He is the most published author of all time in his cardiac specialty. Nonetheless, as he discusses in the later half of this interview has been repeatly attacked since the advent of covid. He is probably the second most significant figure amongst the censored scientists, after Dr Robert Malone.
Moreover, these cardiac risks are just the beginning, as the full Phizer clinical trial documents have identified over 1,500 types of injury related to the Phizer vaccine.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Wednesday January 04, @01:58PM
Part 3
It would be far less of a problem, if they vaccinated only the vulnerable (let us just assume for arguments sake that the vax is safe and effective as claimed). But if they vax everyone as they have attempted to do, we end up in an arms race with the virus. This sends it an incredibly clear and significant signals as to how urgent it is that it evolve and how. The C-19 vaccines all focus on the spike protein which is both the functional means of infection and the most toxic feature of the virus. So where have all the viral innovations been, in order to escape these vaccines? The spike protein, where they contribute most to its escaping the vaccinal antibodies, while also bring with them a staggering increase in the infectiousness of the virus as well.
The traditional decline in virility of viruses is a feature of traditional responses to pandemics which usually reach herd immunity in under 2 years. This pandemic, on the other hand, was met with a massive medical intervention presumably greater than in any previous pandemic and is still ongoing after 3 years with no end in sight.
(Score: 1) by Wong McGregor on Wednesday January 04, @02:40PM
Part 4 (with conclusion)
Second generation vaccines typically cannot revise the immune response of those already vaccinated. This is because of the notion of "original antigenic sin" (OAS). Basically one's first major encounter with the virus, whether naturally or through the vaccines, is the important one for one's immune response going forward as one's immune response tends to be backward looking.
One can find lots of excellent discussions of OAS, and indeed on its interactionwith ADE, on substack:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/is-original-antigenic-sin-starting?s=w [substack.com]
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/original-antigenic-sin-is-a-real [eugyppius.com]
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/homogenizing-herd-level-antigenic [substack.com]
As for the short duration of the vaccine's effectiveness, this probably has something to do with the bi-phasal nature of covid, a view particularly associated with Dr Shankara Chetty but also McCullough. One needs to distinguish the activity of the virus from that of the spike protein. It seems to be an allergic response to the spike protein that tends to kill people, not the virus which is usually gone by that point. So the vaccines may well create tolerance to spike which will be short lived, while Geert doesn't seem to think that the recall of the vaccinal antibodies will be going away (see OAS).
So, to conclude, we have two diametrically opposed courses of action based upon similarly diametrically opposed motives for action. One seeks the 'best' medical outcomes by ending the pandemic as soon as possible, by finding the most direct path to herd immunity. The other seeks the 'best' financial outcomes for a select few by aiming to best monetise the pandemic in the most pervasive and efficient way possible. This leads to a perpetual pandemic based upon medically senseless actions (masking, lockdowns, mass vaccinations) which do little more than create new problems and so endlessly kick the can down the road without ever confronting the underlying problem: corruption formost in our political and medical (and so now in ALL our public) institutions. Show me a single public institution which has not been corrupted by this in Australia.
Indeed, this whole event looks to have been in large part planned beforehand. The people who were involved in the creation of this virus (Gates, Fauci, MIT), have also been the ones proposing to sell us solutions to it. For instance, the current CEO of Moderna was directly involved in the construction of the lab in Wuhan. Moreover, the solutions which they are offering do not seem to have any realistic (ie. scientific) prospect of achieving what they are claiming to be achieve). In fact, they will do the exact opposite. They claim to be protecting the medical system, when what they will ultimately do (when all the chickens come home to roost) is lead to its inevitable collapse. Some have claimed that this just is the modern science of virology. As Brett Weinstein has perceptively observed, this has all been one enormous gain-of-function experiment, beginning first in a lab and then continuing, outside of the lab, with the vaccines.
Clearly the latter, financially motivated, group and their particular course of action has been the overwhelming successful one to this point. How and when will this ever end? Indeed, since they have been so overwhelmingly successful this time around, do you think that they will try this all over again? The modern science of virology.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 02, @07:43PM (1 child)
Getting down-modded means people are choosing not to listen.
https://xkcd.com/1357/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 0) by Wong McGregor on Tuesday January 03, @03:54AM
I'm an Australian so, as I said elsewhere here, I don't seem to have any human rights and certainly nothing like first amendment rights to freedom of expression. Here people are arrested for protesting against draconian government policies and much less, just as in other Commonwealth countries. The following is good brief discussion of where we are at and it doesn't even begin to discuss the tyrannical response to covid here or in the UK.
"Arrested for a social media post" Konstantin Kisin and John Anderson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r7GRx8Sl-s [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, @08:55AM
Oh Jesus Christ...
Joe Rogan: "I'm not a doctor, I'm a f***-ing moron. I'm not a respected source of information, even for me"
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 02, @07:26PM
Which response? They covered a staggering range, from the brilliant (mRNA vaccines) to the outright evil (crowded rallies without masks). Lots of stupidity in between, but also some successes like mass testing: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-south-korea-got-right/.. [nationalreview.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Sunday January 01, @09:36PM (5 children)
Those idiots that didn't get a Covid vaccine are ineligible for any future mRNA vaccines that come available.
I mean, 2 years, millions of jabs, with very few issues. "But the risks!!!" "But it wasn't tested!!!"
They usually test a thousand or two over years; doing millions over months is unprecidented. I'll grant you that. Granted, there could be long term effects. But I'm not hearing about any of them. What I am hearing is most of those hospitalized have not been jabbed. My opinion? If a hospital needs bed space these unjabbed assholes get sent to the curb to make space.
Eff you assholes. If you don't want to be considered part the the herd then by definition you are not part of the herd.
Those of us in the herd? I'm perfectly fine with the lions eating you, considering our elderly did cardio and you ate cheetos watching the Kardashians.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02, @01:12AM (1 child)
What you are hearing is propaganda.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449 [bmj.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Monday January 02, @03:16AM
Provide it, don't just whine impotently about it.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 02, @07:08PM (1 child)
>Granted, there could be long term effects
If so, it will be a hell of a surprise to vaccinologists who have spent their careers in the field and know the history. They're telling anyone who will listen that when there are bad effects from vaccines, they show up in days or weeks, almost none at six weeks, and forget it after two months.
What mechanism could there be? The mRNA gets injected into a body that has spent its life recycling mRNA, quickly.
Though, technically there are almost always long term effects on the immune system, that being the whole point of a vaccine, and I wish they were longer term in fact.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03, @07:31AM
They stabilised the spike proteins. They don't persist for days, they persist for months. Long enough that the immune response changes from gG1/IgG3 (destroy) to IgG4 (build tolerance)
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 02, @07:29PM
Several thousand years of medical ethics would not permit refusing them treatment. If an ER will treat someone who made a failed suicide attempt, they might as well treat someone who refused a lifesaving vaccine.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday January 01, @09:38PM (1 child)
Propaganda around mRNA 'medical technology' reminds me of...
Contergan (Thalidomide).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide [wikipedia.org]
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=contergan+children&t=newext&atb=v327-1&iax=images&ia=images [duckduckgo.com]
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01, @11:14PM
Show me the birth defects from mRNA and then you might have a case. Haven't heard of any yet...