This is very good. Your four-teams analysis is spot on. I am very solidly Team Mainstream, but our team captains have been doing an absolutely terrible job of conveying the actual situation (which is filled with uncertainty that our captains have consistently refused to acknowledge).
Thanks Mark. I think it’s a tragedy that the captains of Team Mainstream, who have a lot of “pieces of the elephant,” have assumed the rightness of their views without putting forth the effort to win people over, consider their concerns, or talk plainly and honestly.
In the past (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) we could assume in the face of a national crisis that everyone would be on board. You didn’t have to work very hard to convince them of the rightness of the path ahead. Times have changed, people have very different sources of information, and our leaders need to try much harder.
I really wish we did have the modern-day equivalent of Fireside Chats — although trust is so far eroded now that I’m not sure it would be accepted very readily.
Our leaders needs to try hard to win back the basic trust of the people. Without that, we’re unable to respond effectively.
I have a slightly different take on the captains. I think that they WANT to win people over, it's just that the way they try to do it does not work very well. They talk like scientists talking to other scientists.
Yes. I can see that. Perhaps they have a poor sense of audience? Maybe they don’t know the extent to which the average Joe or Jane (who’s not combing medRxiv daily for the latest covid info) does not have the context.
The people in charge of convincing us to take action don’t understand that when there’s a new development with the masks, for example, they need to explain why that is. Now all of a sudden there’s talk of wearing N95s everywhere when half of America probably wouldn’t know if an N95 bit them in the ass.
The scientists among them can be forgiven for not communicating clearly to the public I suppose. That’s not necessarily their forte, especially if they spend their time in the lab and not at the bedside.
But…isn’t that what we have speechwriters for? Isn’t that why we have politicians— people with a certain amount of rhetorical skill, to convey important information adequately? I wouldn’t count on Biden to convey my sandwich order to Subway.
I think you are spot on here. They are pressed by the media to say something. And in these situations they cannot simply hedge everything they claim about the virus with twenty caveats (as would be scientifically accurate). If they do hedge their claims the nuances get lost on their way to the headlines.
And there are situtations in which they try to message something consistently, while the evidence is shifting in the background. Then they look like idiots, or worse conspirators.
Still there are people who seem to see the whole elephant.
I don't know what team you would count Zeynep Tufekci on, but in my view, she was the head elephantologist from the get-go.
She called out the unfortunate messaging on mask efficacy in the beginning and continues to be a voice of reason.
I’m not familiar with Zeynap Tufekci (feel free to add a link if you like) but when you were describing that minefield (leaving out the 20 nuances to keep the message simple, and then “losing” either way) I did immediately think of masks.
Team Contrarian is the most annoying on most issues. I have a Google doc going about something similar (I have a couple of almost-ready docs, but have never published anything).
I'm really fucking tired of people telling me how edgy their views are. Mundane shit is true all the time.
Safe and effective for covid vaccines is a phrase that has been used almost like a mantra. The original research for the Pfizer vaccine (based on which the EUA was granted) noted that the vaccine is 95% effective at preventing hospitalisations and it's safe in that no major discrepancy in side effects were found between the placebo and the intervention groups.
However, on the safety side, (1) the randomised control trial procedure was questioned, it seems with a bit of evidence (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635) suggesting that some side-effects were not documented and (2) the trial was derandomised - meaning there's no long-term safety data available beyond the first 6 months. Vaccine safety must now be evaluated from observational studies or time-wise comparisons (which all suffer from a major drawback that confounding factors such as psychological pressure and delayed healthcare will have likely contributed to adverse health effects, so causal vaccine-induced adverse effects cannot be easily demonstrated. The lack of data (and evidence) equates to no safety concerns.
I am struggling to understand how and why people who observe discrepancies in vaccine claims vs reality continue to subscribe to the safe and effective mantra. What's the logical link that i am missing?
Your concerns deserve a more thorough and serious reply than I can probably provide in a quick comment-reply, but this is a great example of why we need more discussion and more transparency, so thanks for bringing it up.
There are privately owned places that do clinical trials, and their mission in life is to extract every last dollar out of it. It sounds like Ventavia might be one, where people are just running these clinical trials to make a buck. The people who work there are overworked and trying to do too much, and so you get mistakes that _shouldn't_ happen, but _do_, such as "needles discarded in a plastic biohazard bag instead of a sharps container box [or...] vaccine packaging materials with trial participants’ identification numbers written on them left out in the open, potentially unblinding participants."
None of this is terribly surprising stuff, I have to say (sadly). It's a little bit like working at a restaurant, and seeing someone rinse off a steak they dropped on the floor and serve it; or knowing about the roach problem in the kitchen. It's yucky, but the insiders know these things exist.
Every time you make a mistake in a clinical trial -- even a small one like leaving the list of ID numbers out in the open where someone could potentially see it and unblind the participants -- you're supposed to admit it and document it. Small errors happen all the time, and the paperwork to document everything almost ensures that you're so short on time you will make additional mistakes, so sometimes sadly people gloss over small mistakes and pretend they didn't happen. Say, someone who was supposed to be called back within 24 hours was not called back until a couple days later (but they also had instructions to go to the Emergency Department if anything was wrong) -- you're supposed to document that mistake, with a form. Every little deviation from the written protocol must be documented.
The person who reported all these sloppinesses and mini-failings is saying that these things happened and weren't reported. That's wrong that these things were happening, if true. Not surprising, but wrong, and it does sound more sloppy than average.
But:
1. One sloppy privately owned site that had 1,000 participants of a total of 44,000+ doesn't negate the data, especially since sloppy data obscures positive results (would tend to make the vaccine look less effective, not more).
2. There's no evidence that anyone was harmed (for example, by the sloppy disposal of the needles or a delay in being phoned back). Even the example given of a "Serious adverse reaction" was a " Grade 3 local reactions" which would be basically an extremely itchy or red injection site, enough that it was distracting or bothersome -- hardly a medical emergency left ignored. Still, that person should have been called back timely per the protocol, and it's wrong if s/he wasn't. Does that mean the vaccine didn't work?
3. If anything, the things the person is describing would make the data "less good" -- for example, while it's not likely that anyone was actually unblinded (just some sloppy handling of the lists) someone who _was_ unblinded and knew they didn't get the vaccine would be more likely to avoid situations where they might get sick, and someone who knew they did get the vaccine might go out and party. In both cases, if it changed anything at all, this would make the effect of the vaccine look smaller than it really was, because the person who was unvaxxed would take actions to make it more likely they stayed healthy, and the person who was vaxxed would take actions to make it more likely they got a breakthrough infection. It would make Pfizer's data worse, not better.
Likewise for the other concerns -- they are sloppy but no actual harm is alleged and if anything they would make the data worse:
"Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff [sloppy, because eyeballs should be on them, but no harm was alleged to have occurred from it, and it would have no effect on the vaccine data]
"Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events [doesn't affect the outcome of the trial -- affects the patients if they don't follow the instructions to go to the hospital if they have any problems; otherwise it's just an annoyance to them not to hear back timely, and it has no effect on the vaccine data]
"Protocol deviations not being reported [mentioned above - you're supposed to fill out a form every time you don't call someone back quickly enough, etc.]
"Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures [would make vaccine less effective]
"Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and [wrong and sloppy, but would not affect the vaccine outcomes]
"Targeting of Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems." [wrong, but unrelated to outcomes]
Overall, the sum of the problems make it sound to me like a place that was run more poorly than average but didn't ultimately affect the data or any patients' safety. If anything, it would have made Pfizer's data worse, and Pfizer has no incentive to encourage any of those practices, because they want their data to be as clean as possible. Clean data are the data that can show effects clearly. Fortunately this place was only one of 153 sites for the trial.
I'm no fan of Pfizer by the way -- at all. I'm just saying this BMJ article is interesting for what it reveals about this particular place, but it really, in my honest estimation, has no bearing on the clinical trial results. I think those privately owned clinical trial places suck, too -- this type of work should not be done for profit. But the fact remains that this vaccine worked well against the original virus.
"Duration of protection and safety data that could be collected in a blinded, placebo-controlled manner were limited by the ethical and practical need to immunize eligible initial placebo recipients under EUA and according to public health authority recommendations."
This is something that happens routinely when you have a really effective drug or vaccine. When your participants, who volunteered to help humankind and agreed to take a certain amount of risk onto themselves, are revealed to have had the placebo, they get to have the "real vaccine" because it would be unethical not to offer it.
This is not something sneaky or unusual that Pfizer did or the FDA did. It's what happens in this exact situation.
I'm not sure what long-term side effects would not be documented, however? What are you thinking this would not catch, if these people are still followed up? They will not be compared any longer to a blinded placebo group (but what good is continued blinding after 6 months?), but they can still be compared to everyone who is not vaxxed, or everyone who received a different type of vax.
You've got 44,000 adults who got the vaccine, and you've got epidemiological data for expected rates of disease for every condition known to humankind. You can easily see if there's any "long-term" signal at this point without your placebo group.
If you also consider the fact that vaccines don't have "long term effects" longer than about 4-6 weeks -- ever, in the history of vaccines, except for antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) which is simply not a concern with coronaviruses, then it would have been even more unethical not to offer the vaccine to the placebo group, because you have no reason to suppose that any "long term effects" will occur with vaccines (which is unlike a lot of drugs).
Thank you for taking the time to write up such a lengthy explanation. I really appreciate it.
Most of the response on protocol deviations has been centred around potential medical implications. I'm not disputing those, you likely have a better understanding of medicine than me. However, most of this vaccine research has little to do with medicine and more to do with statistics. The double-blind randomised control trial (RCT) doesn't investigate vaccine operating mechanisms, rather it statistically analyses the results of an intervention against a baseline. In other words, i don't care how the vaccine works, I only care if i can extract a statistical difference.
The main claim to fame of the double-blind randomised control trial (RCT) methodology is that they eliminate the inherent human bias in sampling and data collection through a strict protocol. Sample idiosyncrasies are spread randomly and in a balanced way across the control and treatment, the personnel administering the treatment behave in a similar manner with subjects in either group, recording information in the same way for both etc. Randomised control trials as a methodology, although mainly applied in medicine, are not necessarily field-restricted (there's a fun article about why we don't do RCT to parachute use https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14684649/). The strict trial protocol is the thing that gives RCT power, because it eliminates human bias.
When evidence comes to light that the protocol may have been (not necessarily deliberately) broken in ways that the core strength of the methodology - i.e. the double blind aspect - was potentially compromised, the data emerging from this analysis have questionable reliability. In other words, if you follow this method you should get reliable results, but if you don't follow it, why should your results still be reliable. So either breaking protocol invalidates results or the method is useless (because breaking it doesn't invalidate the results). To bring that into context, the CDC has consistently said that the vaccines have undergone a rigorous testing process. The BMJ paper suggests the process wasn't that rigorous. And the rigor of the protocol is the main (if not the only) selling point of these vaccines.
On the side effects issue, after vaccinating 70, 80, 90, 95, 97% of population it's difficult to see long-term signals because of the lack of comparison group and confounding factors. In Australia for example, 95-97% of adults over 18 are vaccinated. There's no control group with which to compare long-term health outcomes. How can you find out if there's been an increase in heart problems associated with the vaccine if you can't compare the prevalence of heart disease in a control group?
The only point of analysis remains comparison with historical data. The problem with that analysis are confounding factors. For example, this recent news piece revealed all cause mortality in Indiana went up 40% (https://americanbuddhist.net/2022/01/03/all-cause-mortality-up-40-for-18-64-year-olds-in-indiana/). Is this the vaccine? Who knows - access to medical care has been restricted for a while, lockdowns have contributed to making people lonelier and potentially more disillusioned etc. In the absence of an unvaccinated control group, all analysis is basically interpretation which can vary depending on the scientist's prior beliefs.
I understand that prior research on vaccines shows that they dont have effects longer than 4-6 weeks but most covid vaccines aren't traditional ones. Do they have fewer or more side effects? I definitely don't know - all i'm concerned about is that we're making it impossible to tell.
How can one case counter data? This is an anecdote. An anecdote is not data. I have received three vaccinations and I am now at home with Covid19 coughing my lungs out. Does this mean the vaccines don't work? No. Because it's an anecdote. My one experience does not prove or disprove anything. How can it?
These discussions are exhausting because they remind me of flat earthers who are walking the land with a spirit level and are not able to measure the curvature of the earth.
Only because you cannot measure the curvature of the earth with a spirit level does not mean the earth is flat.
Only because there is one girl whose parent's claim their daughter has weird symptoms after a vaccine trial does not mean the vaccine is unsafe.
There are people who claim they are not eating and living off sunlight for 20 years.
What do you conclude from that? That food is a lie? No!
There are psychological studies that "prove" precognition. Does it mean prognition is real? No!
The whole point of science is that it is an edifice built by many people together. It can therefore transcend the biases and false intuitions of the individuals. If everybody just observed the world before him and drew conclusions from it there would be no progress whatsoever. This does not mean that you have to blindly trust scientists but you have to at least understand the scientific method to give meaningful criticism.
In a situation where we knew very little about a new virus every new pre-print and study was manicly catapulted into the media maelstrom. Many people who never read scientific studies before are now combing through this as if they would find the truth hidden in some obscure table in an appendix.
But one "Maddie" proves nothing. One appendix of a study proves nothing. One study proves nothing.
Science might be tedious, contradictory and unintuitive. But the very fact you are reading this on an electronic device proves that it works.
I agree, and I hope I’m not being overly optimistic that even non-scientists can think somewhat like scientists when evaluating competing claims.
Also I’m sorry to hear you have covid! I hope you are feeling better soon!!
To me, the biggest problem is not that people disagree but that —much more fundamentally— we can’t seem to agree on a set of basic underlying facts.
When someone presents one really odd case and is ready for that to weigh more heavily than all the other mountains of information we have, where do we go next?
Or when someone says (in a different comment) this vaccine is “the deadliest ever” how do we start to have a conversation?
If we can all agree on a basic set of facts, we can discuss it. I want to know how many people have died because of this vaccine. Everyone should want to know. Where’s the information?
It’s hard when, for example, someone told me this morning (not on here) that “everyone” she knows who got an mRNA vaccine was “sick for at least a week.”
How do you begin a discussion with someone who makes that claim? First you want to know— how many people does she know who got vaccinated? But it’s hard to ask that question without seeming as if you doubt her claim. (Did she know only only one person and that person got sick? I would bet the farm that she doesn’t know three people who got sick for a week.)
But how can you even enter into that conversation without making it sound that you think the person is confused or dealing with only one or two anecdotes at best, or is exaggerating or lying at worst?
I know many hundreds of people who got the vaccine. Most were either “a little sore” and nothing else or had a day of feeling run down or feverish which is to be expected because your body is responding to the thing which doesn’t belong there. One person I know was down with symptoms for two days. One person I know was down for three days, with all three doses.
So this person’s set of facts (everyone sick for a week) and my set of facts (most people nothing or sick for a day) are so different — as you say, they’re just anecdotes and not data.
So how do we choose which represents reality better? We turn away from our anecdotes and look at the bigger picture. Scientists follow tens of thousands of people and note their symptoms and tell us whether “a day of feeling run down” or “at least a week of being sick” is the more typical experience.
I’m really interested in how, in our everyday conversations, we can determine where we agree on basic facts.
With Maddie, everyone probably agrees she was in the vaccine trial. Everyone probably agrees that she has a lot of bad symptoms. Everyone agrees it’s terrible to see a child and her family suffering. Everyone agrees the symptoms need to be explained, not just for the child’s benefit but for the public’s benefit. Everyone agrees we want to know if the vaccine is safe or not.
It’s almost as if, in these conversations, sometimes people assume bad intentions when there’s no logical basis for it.
For example, why would anyone _not_ want to know if these vaccines are dangerous? Why would anyone want it to be covered up if the vaccine harmed this child?What would the vaccine maker stand to gain, by continuing to give a harmful vaccine? Think about how quickly Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine’s problems were recognized, how quickly warnings went out, and how soon thereafter the vaccine’s use was discouraged.
If people believe this is a big coverup, how do they explain the motivations for the coverup? Is it just evil villains promoting a harmful vaccine for fun?
We’re all need to agree on those facts. Then we can discuss what those facts mean.
I just deleted a long reply because it was redundant to your points. So let me just say: Thanks for your thoughtful answer. I mostly agree.
I do not share your optimistic outlook because it assumes a common interest in the project of the Enlightenment.
People want to believe alternative and contrarian explanations because they have little to contribute to the advancement of science. Science has become so fragmented and specialized that you have to study for your whole life to contribute some tiny speck of knowledge.
The elephant is already well-known, its genome is mapped and its anatomy is described to the smallest detail. Little can you contribute as a blind man grasping at it.
But if you are on an online forum where you can decipher a secret message from Q and find out about a diabolic cabal of child molesters. That's something different. You are elbow-deep in the shit of the elephant, but at least you are contributing something.
Well, Tilman, now you have succeeded in depressing me. (ha ha)
So...you're saying a part of our problem is the problem of hyperspecialization, so that we are all off in our niche contributing our tiny speck of knowledge? And perhaps we are so hyperspecialized that we don't communicate well with others? (Or perhaps we can communicate well, but only with others in our sub-sub-sub field? Or...?)
Most of the people arguing online, though, aren't in a sub-sub-sub field (or part of science or academia at all), so they didn't get that mindset from hyperspecialization (I'm guessing).
Most of the people arguing online are no longer getting their basic information about the world from the same few consistent sources (as Matt Taibbi describes in Hate Inc.). In earlier decades, the news had to appeal to everyone: people of all age groups, ethnic groups, social classes, political leanings.
Now it's all very niche. Instead of informing us more or less neutrally about current world events, the news is meant to appeal to our personal sensibilities.
Did you see the documentary The Social Dilemma? To me, that seems to account for the fragmented state of knowledge we see in the public sphere.
Thanks to social media algorithms, which give us more of whatever keeps us online (which are often things that induce fear or outrage) we have very fragmented, niche, and wildly different sources of "information."
Some people are kept online by reading stories of "anti-vaxxers" and how they are prolonging the pandemic. The come to believe the "anti-vaxxers" are the biggest jerks (or ignoramuses) in the world.
Other people are kept online by reading stories of horrible vaccine outcomes. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not, but if if keeps them reading, their algorithm will send them stories of horrible vaccine outcomes, and then this becomes something that they've "read everywhere" and therefore believe absolutely.
And so on.
As a consequence, there are several different versions of "reality" now, without a common source of news to ground us in a common set of facts. And each person believes in one or another of the versions, and the versions of reality don't agree, and we can't even address a global disaster effectively.
If someone who believes that vaccines are killing children encounters someone who thinks vaccines are not killing children, they are predisposed to think that person is an idiot or a monster or in league with the pharmaceutical companies.
It's a real barrier to sensemaking and developing good policies.
My Lab Leak 2.0 story of course was put forward as a good faith hypothesis, to get people talking about GoF and to think about whether -- whatever really happened -- this risky research is worth potentially killing millions of people and disrupting all our lives for years. And important topic right? And one which needs to be taken seriously, regardless of what you think of the specific hypothesis I put out there.
But I got a lot of people responding who believe so many other odd things, and it's hard to imagine harnessing that energy for the common good. If they don't want to meet someone from another "team" halfway and listen to their version of events, and respond to their data and information, then we're going to stay divided, and dare I say, remain collectively more ignorant as a result.
Yes you are right, most people who are arguing online are not working in a hyperspecialized field of science. And that is why there is a growing disconnect between what people argue about and what is known to be a scientific fact.
In 1781 William Herrschel discovered Uranus with a self-made telescope while working a day-job as a musician. What can I contribute to science today with a self-made telescope? Nothing.
But while they cannot contribute a lot, people can have an opinion on any topic now. They look it up online and gobble up whatever their social media bubble spits at them.
When Drosten, the German Dr.Fauci, was asked about Influenca, he said: "well, I am an expert on coronaviruses, not on influenca, so take my statements with a grain of salt."
When you ask Karlheinz, from the street protests in front of the Parliament, you can be sure he knows for a fact that influenca is much more dangerous than covid-19.
Now to be clear, that's not only Karlheinz's fault. It's also a failure of science communication. The detachment goes both ways. When Drosten was asked about GoF research, he said something along the lines of: well the experts know how to do this properly, while the non-experts are just being emotional (yes, that's a very uncharitable summary, he was much more careful, but it could easily be understood that way).
There is certainly room for someone between these two worlds who can take concerns seriously and bridge this gap.
I have not seen the documentary you mention yet, but it's on Netflix right? I'll watch it the next weeks while quarantined.
And thanks for the wishes, my symptoms are not that bad. But now the rest of my family caught it...
Oh no! I wish all your family good health as well! May everyone recover quickly and completely! And I hope you "enjoy" some of your quarantined time, even though that sounds like a weird thing to say. If I had two weeks off from my "day job" I'd do a lot of reading.
Yes the movie is on Netflix if you have a chance to watch it. I think it is very worthwhile.
This comment really struck me: "In 1781 William Herrschel discovered Uranus with a self-made telescope while working a day-job as a musician. What can I contribute to science today with a self-made telescope? Nothing." Yes, wow. Exactly. I see your earlier point in sharper focus now!!!!
So this is a very interesting coincidence: I just read a long interview with Drosten within the last few days and now I can't remember why I was reading that particular interview, but he seemed rather, yes, cavalier about GoF. Or, maybe it's not a coincidence -- maybe you sent me the link, and I don't remember! I try to read many things which are recommended by other people, and then I forget who recommended them!
But tell me: Do you think the messaging in Germany is equally inadequate? Perhaps I pick on the US too much, and think our faults are unique. I thought it was a complete disaster that this occurred while Trump was in office. Any other leader, I believe, would have tried to bring everyone together, but he is such a petty, self-involved little man that he politicized the issue, and brought his own special brand of ignorance to the crisis. Once it was so badly politicized, no one else had a chance to undo that damage. Not that I'm a fan of Biden either.
This is very misguided. First of all, you don't comprehend that all such data is inherently "anecdotal" -- every patient that comes into a doctor/scientist is an "anecdote", which when analyzed properly yield patterns. If you eliminate anecdotal data then you have no data.
Single anecdotes are often not strongly indicative, but in this case the single anecdote is strong enough to bring into question the integrity of Pfizer's process, just as a single rape case can be strong enough to send someone to prison for life. Such cases should be subject to an active judicial process, not dismissed on pseudoscientific reasoning, as you're doing.
Yes, many anecdotes, if "analyzed properly" might yield patterns. I have never doubted that. But you are talking about ONE case. How can you "yield a pattern" from one case on which you do not have reliable information, just some propaganda videos financed by a notorious anti-vaxxer.
Like I said, I can cite you some cases of people who claim they are living off sunlight for decades. There are people who claim to have gotten morgellons from masks. So what? this is simply not convincing.
And I do not see how this weird rape analogy or a judicial process does apply to anything.
Scientific truth is not established by a judicial process. I don't even understand where you're coming from here.
I never indicated you "doubted" that. Point is you're fixated on that.
Rape is a single "anecdote": a girl comes in and claims such and such happened to her, not necessarily having any evidence except her own reports. The same is the case with Maddie and her mom, they have claims. These claims should be evaluated properly, and they're simply being ignored.
Judicial process is relevant because their overall claims imply fraud, which is criminal. If they are telling us the truth, the Pfizer/FDA hid adverse event data from us. Such claims should be seriously considered and evaluated by a transparent process, not dismissed like you are doing, which is perfectly analogous to dismissing someone's rape claims.
The mum was on Tucker Carlson and has lawyers pursuing her case. I'd hardly call this "being ignored". The Salonnière pointed out that the public does know only one side of the story because the doctors and lawyers are not able to talk freely about this.
Believable claims warrant investigation. And I have no reason to believe this standard is not being applied here.
One such claim however is not reason to assume widespread fraud.
Did you immediately assume that public lynchings are taking place in Chicago once you heard Jussie Smollets claims?
A bit of skepticism is not a bad thing, especially regarding the fact that I can only find information on Maddie on very very weird websites.
You misunderstand what I meant by "ignored." I meant that the pertinent institutions that should have been transparently dealing with her case have been ignoring it.
"doctors and lawyers are not able to talk freely about this"
You say that as if it's somehow exonerating. Why are they allegedly not able to?
I’ve read what I can find about Maddie de Garay and I admit I’m confused by it.
There doesn’t seem to be a hypothesized _mechanism_ related to the vaccine for this set of symptoms to be happening to her.
For example, we know why the vaccine does some other rare things, like cause anaphylaxis or rare myocarditis. We understand how they occur. But we don’t know why or how, even hypothetically, such a weird assortment of symptoms happened to this poor kid.
So, I understand why some people are saying it’s psychogenic. Kids have psychogenic illnesses more often than you might think, and sometimes really dramatic stuff too, like seizures or not being able to walk.
On the other hand, you can’t just write it off right? It needs to be examined and discussed and the full truth needs to come out publicly and openly. To hide it creates fear. And the stakes are high: we’re talking about vaccines being given to kids, so the public wants a full accounting.
On the third hand, the _only_ things that you’re going to hear are the things that the family chooses to reveal. You can’t reveal someone else’s medical information, right? There’s HIPAA.
So… suppose Maddie is not able to walk. And suppose the doctors do some tests and find there’s no physical reason she can’t walk. Well, they can’t go on the news and say so. And Maddie’s family is not saying (for example) “here is the diagnosis and here are the medical tests showing what’s physically wrong.” So is there anything physically wrong? And if so, is there any reasonable way it’s related to what the vaccine is capable of doing?
If I twirl three times and get dizzy, we know sometimes that happens and we understand why, physically. But if I twirl three times and then the next day my hair starts falling out, is there any hypothetical way the twirling caused the hair loss? That’s what I’m getting at.
For a doctor to suggest a child’s health problems are psychogenic — especially when the child seems very sincerely to be suffering (ie, she is not making it up) is often received very poorly by the family. You can understand why, especially if the symptoms are dramatic and the parents suspect the doctors’ actions might have harmed her.
But if the doctors claimed (as I read in a couple of places) that this was “anxiety” (psychogenic), then you can be pretty sure that the family and their assortment of doctors have not been able to demonstrate there’s any physical damage.
You should be able to see why someone can’t walk, for example. You should be able to see (say) spinal cord damage.
There’s something extremely incomplete — on both sides — about the stories being told. The “vaccine side” seems to want to hush it up, which is not a good idea, but they are limited in what they can say publicly. It’s natural they don’t want to be subject to one-sided accusations. Maddie’s family seems not to present anything very specific. What specific things are physically wrong? Where is the damage, physically? By what mechanism could the vaccine have done these dramatic things and why has it not done that to other people, ever, in the billions of other doses given?
I hate to say anything about a sick kid, because I genuinely feel sad for her and I wish wholeheartedly that she were not suffering, but something about this story is _missing_.
We just don’t know what. Until we do know, it’s hard to know what Maddie’s story tells us. It needs to be discussed more openly. That’s probably something everyone can agree on. I hope she’ll be OK.
I think you need to do some deep soul-searching. You are dismissing the evidence right in front of you on the grounds of figments of your imagination (your "hypotheses" of alternative explanations than the evident one). Meanwhile, a little girl's life has been destroyed.
We should certainly assume Maddie and her mom are telling the truth, at least until such time as the system that so abused them have explained themselves satisfactorily and given us a REAL basis to dismiss it like you're doing. Instead they say nothing about her case, and they will not return calls.
How am I dismissing it? I say we need to understand it and currently we don’t understand it.
Do we agree? No one knows what caused her symptoms? One hypothesis is psychogenic. That’s not an insult. This can presumably be ruled out if physical problems are present. I’m not saying what it is or is not, because I don’t know.
I’d very much like to know what is causing her paralysis and presumably if there’s a physical cause, it can be shown by existing technologies.
I’m confident that if this child has physical problems, she can find doctors to help her, and if those physical problems relate to the vaccine, I’m sure she can find lawyers to help her. If that’s the case, I hope she and her family get compensation.
Whatever her condition, I feel very sorry for this child and for her loved ones. It’s tragic.
If anyone has information about her physical problems (such as spinal cord damage causing paralysis) and/or information about how her symptoms hypothetically relate to anything in the vaccines, I’m here to listen to it with an open mind at any time. I’m not dismissing anything. I’d really like to know. We need to know and to understand it.
I don’t know what happened to her. Neither do you. The most we can say is that it seems very odd and needs to be explained. Do we agree?
As for any other documented problems that occurred in other people, including the ones that are so rare that we even don’t know whether they are linked to the vaccine yet (such as autoimmune liver disease) or whether they are part of natural base rates (meaning a certain small number of people develop every physical condition regardless of whether they got a vaccine), at least in those cases we know how —hypothetically— a vaccine can cause an autoimmune reaction, which is why articles are written about the various autoimmune cases. Everyone wants to keep an eye on those.
Likewise we know how a vaccine can hypothetically cause myocarditis. So we’re looking at that carefully.
Unfortunately, for this set of symptoms, no one has a hypothesis for how Maddie’s symptoms could relate to anything the vaccine is capable of. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It seems unlikely, but again: I don’t know and neither do you. So I keep an open mind until we have more information.
I’m not saying anyone is lying or acting in bad faith. I’m saying her case is bizarre and deserves attention but doesn’t seem to fit in rationally with anything the vaccine might reasonably do.
Even if this could eventually be said to be linked to the vaccines, then it occurs as a one-in-9-billion event (once among the number of doses given worldwide) and would not be a reason to take the benefit of the vaccine away from everyone else.
That might sound callous but it’s not. If you take the vaccine away for a one-in-9-billion event you are killing at least hundreds of thousands, probably millions, more.
We haven’t seen another case like Maddie’s. If this were, as your link suggested, a 1 in 1000 event, we’d have 5,000 Maddies by now in the news. Word would get around.
It sounds like the doctors and the FDA made the right call on this.
If the Maddie de Garay case is as it appears (clinical trial fraud), then you can't trust their data, period. We have to get to the bottom of that.
But even if we could trust their data, what is the actual long-term risk vs. benefit *for the kids* in giving the vax to them? Everything I've seen, even the official data, says there it's exactly the wrong call to be giving to to them. And the substance of the data (that I've seen) is mere increase of antibody titers, not which is not an objective benefit.
Reading the article in full is the way to go, so you know what they're talking about. These are the disorders noted:
Vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia is associated with the adenovirus vaccines (not the mRNA vaccines).
Low platelets (very rare, could be associated with the mRNA vaccines--the article describes 5 cases, making this much less than a one-in-a-million event, if it's related at all)
Liver disease, probably exacerbated by pregnancy and/or drug use (unclear whether vaccines are related at all, and the authors say this, because it's so rare)
Guillain Barre (associated with the adenovirus vaccines, not the mRNA vaccines)
Autoimmune kidney disease -- so rare it's not clear whether it's related to the vaccines at all.
inflammatory arthritis -- rare, associated possibly with vaccines that are not given in the US, and those are not mRNA vaccines
lupus -- based on a single case report and _not_ associated with an mRNA vaccine
Reading this article in full actually reassured me a lot. The mRNA vaccines are much safer than older kinds of vaccines. For example, if the liver disease were a one-in-a-million event, we'd have hundreds of case reports in the US by now, enough to tell that there's a rare chance of getting it. But we have so few case reports that the authors can't even tell if there's a relationship.
Reading the full article is usually the best way to go, so you get full information.
These vaccines (all of them) are the perfect recipe for autoimmune problems, as they quite literally instruct the body to attack itself. It would be very surprising if they did not cause autoimmune problems.
Since I'd probably get put on "Team Contrarian" let me make a few points about my position that you didn't.
(1) Good guys don't censor, that's what people like Nazis do. The good guys engage contrarians, they don't shut them down and lock them out. Censorship is step 1 of genocide, and we are living through a genocide against contrarians, the same old story of Socrates being forced to drink the hemlock. If you support censorship then I'm not going to consider you trustworthy, I will think that you are either too stupid to comprehend such principles or are actively genocidal.
(2) If you support infringing the standard doctor-patient relation and using institutional power to block alternative treatments like HCQ and ivermectin then I'll likewise either consider you too stupid to understand why it's a good thing that we've always had "off label treatment" left to individual doctor discretion, or I'll consider you actively genocidal.
Really I think this is "Team Ethical" not "Team Contrarian", because these ethical norms being violated in front of us are not hard to understand. If the significance of this absolutely evil violation of these norms is lost on you, then something is very very wrong with you. Ergo the "contrarian" explanation that you're involved in some kind of "mass formation psychosis."
So I see you’re grasping your piece of the elephant pretty tightly and you don’t seem to want to engage with people who have different pieces. Therefore I’m not sure how to respond to you. You’ve not left room for anyone else’s ideas. Be well, though.
No, but you are grasping your inapplicable metaphor pretty tightly. If you can't explain why my ethical principles are misguided, the problem is with you. I on the other hand am totally open to engaging any idea, even wrongheaded ones like yours.
What do you mean that I have to “explain why [your] ethical principles are misguided”? To me this has nothing to do with your ethical principles and everything to do with what is factually true.
Exactly what are you claiming that I'm "grasping" "tightly"? I'm the one that's open to debate here, you're the one walking off the field at the first brush of difficulty.
If by "walking off the field" you mean I have a day job and can't spend all day engaging with any one commenter on my (free) substack, yeah, I "walked off the field."
I have addressed all your points, and so has Tilman, and yet you don't have a narrative that makes any sense, nor can you answer any of the commonsense questions that need to be answered if you want to support the claim that this vaccine did anything to this unfortunate child, who I hope will be well. I wish you well as well. I haven't seen you offer anything substantial. If you do have something substantial to offer at a later time, I'll be glad to revisit it.
I also love that parable, and like so many old parables, it would be easy to gloss over the profundity of it.
I am 100% a person who had real, visceral dread about Tr*mp. Lol see even with the asterisk? He who must not be named. I STILL think he is a horrible person, a bad leader, and untrustworthy as fuck. I no longer think every single thing he did was total garbage, necessarily. For instance, the shut down of travel made logical sense to me. And instead of making a logical explanation for why travel bans *didn’t* make sense, all I got was “racism!” I’m like, he is a racist, but that doesn’t make this one thing racist by default.
All this is to say the pandemic has made me slow down and start listening to people holding other bits of the elephant. I hope whatever it is I’m touching is the nose or the tail, if you follow me.
Yes! I truly disliked the guy too, because I thought he was not temperamentally or intelllectually capable of leading us well, but yes, not everything a racist guy does is racist (for example, as you said).
I struggle to find nice things to say about him, but I try if for no other reason to remind myself that no one is a total monster, so:
He threw a ton of money at vaccine development, which was a good thing.
Everyone who sees the wisdom behind “figuring out the elephant” needs to spread the word. We’ve absolutely got to collaborate even with people who disagree with us and hash out our disagreements from a more rational and thoughtful perspective.
Start reading from PDF page 17. You will want to rotate it in the PDF viewer to preserve sanity. And yes, the sourcing organization is not reliable and the author of the top-level document has chosen his agenda. Against all odds, I'd like to see a cogent discussion of the underlying source material.
I will look at this (just scrolled through). Yeah the initial letter looks kind of fake -- a "vaccine for bats" that is very fond of human ACE2 receptors, right? To spray in caves? I'm interested to know the back-story of these documents and where they came from. Thanks for sharing. It's definitely a compelling topic that would be great to discuss. Thanks!
Yea the author of the intro docs (Major Murphy) misinterprets and overplays the source material that starts on page 17. But that source material is still very interesting, if legit.
The two phases of research (mainly from Executive Summary on 17):
1) Find bat virus that show potential to cause SARS-like disease (spillover to humans)
2) Boost immune response in bats, which ordinarily would not clear the virus, to eliminate those found in (1). This would use the original bat spike found in the wild, not any spikes that evolved in phase 1 research. I'm ignoring this.
The way they go about #1 is somewhere between concerning and idiotic, if I understand correctly...
Bat bACE2 is not equal to human hACE2. But we've already found some bACE2 spike that can (inefficiently) infect human tissue in vitro (these are referenced top right of PDF p. 19):
Now look at PDF p. 21, right column starting at "Experimental assays of SARSr-CoV QS jump potential..."
- They first use modelling to identify candidates
- Then they play with them using in vitro cultures and in vivo mice expressing hACE2 (PDF p. 22) and let's see what happens!
Just in case that doesn't get interesting, let's try synthetic modifications and throw those in the humanized mice too (PDF p. 22). Aren't we just begging for SARS-CoV-2 at this point?
This is when you want to check the date on this proposal. PDF page 16, circa 2018.
As to authenticity of the docs themselves, coming via Project Veritas smells. Badly. But who else would publish them? Maybe The Intercept?
Some weeks ago i was seeing a mute storyteller with my sons. He was telling the story of the elephant in a combination of sign language and pantomime. That was really cool.
Love the parable about the blind men and the elephant. It's a good summation of the Covid information stories you get from the different quarters. Nice job.
I liked your description of the “teams”. It’s a really good way to capture the tribal aspect of what is happening.
My quick reaction, though, is that you neglected one of the main points about Team Mainstream. They are the ones who have gone into hysteria mode, to the point of mandates and vaccine passports. They are the ones who are committed to forcing their views on everyone else, no matter the damage, especially to children. Look at what is happening in Australia, Canada, and much of Europe. They seem to be losing their grip on the concepts of Western Civilization.
I do agree that any group that’s in charge tends to force its views on the others. Right now though, I’m not seeing broad mandates (except for some health care jobs) and passports (except for some very local laws, eg NYC and LA) here in the States.
I’m not sure I’d categorize Team Mainstream as hysterical overall. The few people who are very afraid _do_ tend to find their allies among those who promote vaccines and targeted closures during hospital-crashing surges, as opposed to the other groups. Maybe they’re a fifth Team— those who are really afraid for whatever reason? Team Fearful? But I don’t think “hysterical” fits Team Mainstream, just as “ignorant” doesn’t fit some of the other teams (which is often Team Mainstream’s way of dismissing everyone else)! :)
I'm puzzled how you would not consider the OSHA rules currently under review by SCOTUS to be a broad mandate? If the mandates do not come to pass, it will not be for lack of trying by Team Mainstream.
And the vaccine passports may be local, in the sense that only some cities have them, but NYC, LA and Chicago are the largest cities in the country. They are not confined to some backwater towns.
You have a good point. I’ve been assuming that SCOTUS won’t go along with it. Maybe I’m wrong.
And you make a good point that these are not backwaters. My own biases might be coming into play here. In enormous cities, I think it makes good sense to limit large public events to the vaccinated, so maybe my impulse is just to justify it as a good idea without thinking about it too hard.
Why do you think those are bad ideas? Would any vaccine requirements be appropriate ever?
I don't know that I would be opposed to any vaccine requirement ever. I don't think this situation rises to the level of requiring such drastic measures.
First, let me say that I have been vaccinated. I am not an anti-vaxxer in general. We all know and acknowledge that the vaccines do not stop transmission. An unvaccinated person does not represent any more danger in terms of transmission than a vaccinated person. It makes no sense to me to mandate a vaccine that does not stop transmission. I also don't like mandating a vaccine for which we do not yet have long term data. Why should vaccines be required for children, who have almost zero risk from the virus? Or for those who have natural immunity? What about focusing on developing therapeutics?
But most of all, I think it is very dangerous to sanction (enthusiastically) the creation of a category of "outcasts" in society. That kind of thinking has never led anywhere good. I fear it will be more destructive than COVID in the long run.
I agree with you about creating outcasts: and some people indeed treat the unvaxxed as outcasts. No. That’s just wrong.
I disagree about transmission. Here’s my best understanding. Originally, back when the vaccines worked 95% against the earlier virus, we were told there was almost no transmission (except for the rare breakthrough cases).
Now that we’re dealing with a less effective vaccine and more chance of breakthroughs, there’s more transmission of course: infected>>>transmission. But there’s still less among vaccinated people. I believe the linked news article even mentions that, although maybe I’m mixing up my news articles.
Re long-term data, we disagree. Drugs of many kinds _can_ cause long-term effects. For instance, ibuprofen can damage your kidneys. But there’s never been a case of a vaccine causing a long-term effect (except for antibody dependent enhancement which is not a concern with coronaviruses). Vaccines do their thing very briefly and they’re gone. They don’t have effects, ever, more than 4-6 weeks after being given. We have billions of doses, millions of which were given a over a year ago. We’re well beyond the 4-6 week window. Just like every other vaccine in history, the effects are short-term, mainly related to inflammation which is part of the immune response prompted by the vaccine. There is no concern about long-term effects. That’s one of many things that has been extremely poorly communicated by our experts and leaders.
I agree with you that therapeutics are great. I hope we see more. Those were game-changers for HIV.
To me, if we had a very effective vaccine again, it would make sense to have mandates to save people from themselves and so we could all get on with life, although I’d far prefer people agreeing of their own free will (because they’re convinced of the wisdom of it).
Currently vaccine passports with the less effective vaccines probably don’t make as much sense.
Salonniere, it is more than just some people treating the unvaxxed as outcasts. With mandates and vax passports, they are outcasts BY LAW. That is a huge difference, reminiscent of some very ugly history.
And while these measures will persuade some to get vaccinated, the most likely outcome will be a black market in fake vax cards. And then a program to catch and prosecute cheaters. We would be making criminals out of people who simply want to live their lives. And remember, many of the unvaccinated have already had COVID.
As you can tell, I would put myself on Team Freedom, while recognizing some of the Team Mainstream positions. I do not believe the claimed benefits of forced vaccination outweigh my concerns.
As a last note, when I see people who are healthy enough to stand for hours in a line to get tested, I do think that there is hysteria involved.
Like the elephant analogy. The "blind" and "ability to access only part of the elephant" premise point back to a question. Why is that so? Why are we stuck groping our corner of the elephant? To me, this is the critical question of our time. The covid elephant story provides the answer. We need to step back and remove the blindfold
The story assumes blind inquisitors. It works for an analogy, but we aren't willfully blind. As discussed, echo chambers strongly contribute to blindness. But why did we recede into Ocho chambers?
There are a million theories about echo chambers, but here's a simple one- lack of trust from traditional information sources. Think about the size and scope of today's federal beuacracy. We hardly ever interact with them. When we do (usually at a state or local level), we certainly don't point to them as bastions of world-class kindness and care. When parents peeked into classrooms courtesy of covid "remote learning" (I chuckle every time is see those words together), they wondered where the three R's went, having been subjugated to issues of real importance such as- does my daughter have to share a locker room with a football team suddenly realizing their jocks were protecting figurative vaginas instead of family jewels? Firsthand transparency changed a l ot of minds pretty quickly
But we rarely, if ever, interact with the federal government, even as a business owner. It's a dreadful experience, trust me. Though who's in charge does make a difference, the motto, "less is more" applies across any administration. The point is, we have almost no firsthand knowledge, gained from experience, to have any idea what the heck is going on federally. It stays that way, until something like covid comes along
For argument's sake, let's pretend the virus has some connection to the grant we issued to the WIV. This grant represents such a small domain in the grand scheme of our fed we have no hope of getting to scratch that part of the elephant. Moreover, if we did have that chance, who's going to volunteer to stick their arm up the elephant's backside to find it?
That dirty job thankfully belongs to the media, a group fully deserving of that particular exam. Except you won't find them doing it. Nor will you find them helping describe any part of the elephant, at least in factual terms. What you will find is the media willfully, gleefully, describing the elephant just as the overlords want you to see it
And that's the key piece. For a long time we believed the story was at least somewhat representative. The examples of removing the blindfold and seeing something entirely different are too numerous to mention. Look no further than covid messaging to see why distrust in media-provided "facts" turned out, well.....not so good for team establishment. And everyone noticed. Uh oh
As people realize they're looking at a hippo instead of the promised elephant, they try to find ways to get better information. And who can blame them? Yet they are blamed, shamed and flogged until, by God, it is an elephant! That isn't the American ethos, however, and the smartest ones in the room are finding that out. Post-virginia, by strange coincidence, the narrative is gently shifting to what contrarians and skeptics have questioned all along. In addition to realizing what a self-own remote learning turned into (those meddling parents!), it seems keeping kids out of school isn't politically popular. The fact that it most hurt the disadvantaged communities it purports to exclusively help completes the failure trifecta
While I agree our information safe havens don't give us the full picture, their very existence indicates a population desperate for better. Perfect is the enemy of better. Perfection always alludes humanity, but we must not allow it to impede better. And forums like Substack, where diverse viewpoints are recognized as enrichment instead of danger, certainly move us toward better
Thanks for your comments! I agree that there is distrust of regular information sources, and that distrust is richly deserved. That sends people looking for other information sources.
It's completely appropriate to look for other info sources, but the social media algorithms, as described in "The Social Dilemma" (documentary) illustrate how something simple like "giving people more of what they want, so they remain online" which is a simple business tactic turns quickly into something pernicious. The goal was just to keep more eyeballs glued to screens, but the result of "feeding people the self-reinforcing narratives that keep them online, regardless of truth" is that people are in their own little camps, each believing they have the "real news" and everyone else is a dummy or a tool of the state.
I think the analogy falls apart if we talk of removing blindfolds, honestly. Everyone of course can come to his or her own conclusion, but to me, part of the beauty of the parable is that we all -- no matter how much we know -- only have a small portion of reality. We have a valuable piece to contribute, but only a piece.
For example, I might know what the pandemic is doing to our local hospitals, but I don't know what the pandemic is doing to hospitals in Iceland or Rwanda. I don't know what the pandemic is doing to plumbers in my region (much less Iceland or Rwanda).
No matter how well we try to learn and see "the big picture" we all have just a tiny piece, and that's why we need to rely on others and talk to them.
I have strong views, say, on childhood vaccination, but I can learn things from other people which might (or on the other hand, might not) make me re-think my views. But, the important thing is approaching the elephant knowing that other people have information that I don't, and being open to accept the information!
For example, something like "remote learning" -- it sucked. I think we can all agree on that. But no one really believed "this will be great for anyone." We closed the schools because it seemed the best of bad options at the time, especially before we had the vaccines.
To me, it comes down to, people made a call to prevent the hospitals from collapsing and to minimize deaths, and one of many bad outcomes from that was that kids missed out on learning (and much more, cooped up in their homes).
But I think it's a mistake to move from a true statement, like "Remote learning really sucked," to assuming that "The people who promoted remote learning in the context of a specific global disaster knew it sucked and did it anyway -- and had bad motives." You know what I mean?
All of us on every team have a tendency to assume bad intent from the others -- partly because our social media algorithms get us to remain online longer if they give us information about "dangers" -- even if the dangers are simply "people who have different opinions."
Forgive me if my comments projected bad intentions onto those who closed school (or anyone else for that matter). While I do believe evidence indicates our educationall system lost focus on families and primary education, that's a discussion for a different day. No matter why they closed schools (and yes there were good reasons at the beginning), the transparency granted to parents via remote learning (among other factors) led to a parental revolt
We have to ask, why is reality so different from what we assumed, from what we've been told? Lack of involvement plays a part. But as you mentioned, even those actively engaged see only a tiny part of it. Everyone understands they can't see the whole elephant; they simply want to know it's an elephant
The parable demonstrates our reliance on others for discovery. We also misinterpret our own discovery due to perspective. Very true. The sheer size of the beast impedes our ability to self-discover
This holds true especially when we encounter something completely unfamiliar and out of sight. Self discovery becomes next to impossible. Our navigation naturally seeks "trustworthy" sources. When those sources prove untrustworthy, we navigate to other sources
We're well served by collective discovery from others with a different perspective. The problem arises when people paid specifically to help us navigate the unknown 1. Willfully provide inaccurate information, 2. Prevent the flow of information between camps, 3. Favor certain camps above others, 4. Berate and cancel the unfavored camps, and 5. Insist you're looking at an elephant, not a hippo
Your commentary on social media and other information sources demonstrates the primary point. Humans gravitate to positive feedback loops. They do so particularly when they encounter cognitive dissonance, largely created when "neutral" sources, time and again, prove to be anything but. Camps turn to information sources they know contain bias. But most in the camp at least recognize it, while the "neutral" sources stubbornly cling to a narrative that casts themselves as worthy arbiters of the elephant grope
Why they do it is less concern to me than exposing the farcical game they play. And it is a dangerous one, as we can plainly see with covid. We have no recourse without transparency and accountability. Lack thereof provides the perfect recipe for government run amok. Welcome to America, omicron
You failed to mention Ivermectin, a Nobel Prize winning drug proclaimed to be a miracle drug of the same level as aspirin and penicillin, which is used against other viruses, and the mountain of evidence that it is safe and works, yet to refused emergency authorization. This after Fauci claimed they were looking for anything that could slow or stop this virus. Fauci claimed there were no studies. He deliberately equated the drug as for livestock and unsafe, ignoring the billions of doses already safely given to people.
In May of 2021, a study showed that Ivermectin was effective by having 3/4 fewer deaths of severely ill patients than conventional treatments. Doctors who had went public in the early months to tell the effectiveness of Ivermectin were ridiculed and silenced. Some health care providers lost their licenses.
Ivermectin has been shown on the national platform that it works by football players who took the drug, got Covid, but had few to no symptoms. Why? Ivermectin cost ten cents a pill. An entire months course is $3.20 in cost. The expensive vaccine that is bankrupting the U.S. couldn't compete.
And yet, if I hope I can direct you to a section of my other post about Robert Malone, where I explain this more fully but:
1) I too was open to ivermectin (and other repurposed drugs) working.
2) The evidence was interesting at first but meta-analyses show it doesn’t work.
3) It’s true that Big Pharma is greedy and hawks all sorts of expensive useless drugs, but there’s no evidence anyone is failing to use a miracle drug for that reason. In fact, other cheap out-of-patent drugs, the corticosteroids, DO work to save lives, and ARE now routinely used on patients. If there is no effort to prevent the use of corticosteroids, then you have a very hard time persuading me that there’s just an effort to prevent the use of ivermectin. There’s no motive. If it really saved people, (instead of the early claims being shown to be put forward by people who literally faked their data) our doctors would be using it. Guaranteed. Any claim that ivermectin is a miracle drug being kept from patients has to explain why corticosteroids are not.
"It’s also true that you have a much lower chance of being hospitalized and an even lower chance of being in the ICU if you’re vaccinated than if you’re not."
You cannot say this with the information provided. You would need a randomized clinical trial that equated both groups before looking at the hospital data. The actual clinical trials do not support this statement, and they were shut down and unblinded long before we could get close to saying something so emphatic with any degree of confidence. Frankly, they were so filled with relatively young and healthy participants, that even if they weren't cut short, I'm not sure how much we could say about the whole population, but I digress.
Your statement assumes a causality that we simply cannot claim. I'm not saying that we can claim the opposite. We don't have enough information. We don't know if the populations of vaccinated and unvaccinated hospital patients are comparable (in fact, we should assume they are not, since equating would take an enormous amount of effort and having this occur by chance is extremely unlikely). The from vs. with question could be poisoning these calculations in any number of ways.
I would also like to know who these patients are. Many patients are hospitalized because they are very old and frail and/or close to death. Of course, such patients were always more likely to be in the hospital than healthy 65 year-olds. Yet those healthy 65 year-olds are much more likely to be vaccinated than the close-to-death 90 year-olds, who are in turn much more likely to be in the hospital picking up a nosocomial COVID infection. I could go on, but I think the general point is clear. There is too much we do not know.
Sorry if this is just semantics. Perhaps you didn't intend to phrase your assertion in the way I am reading it.
You cannot, and will not, ever see a "clinical trial" on whether withholding an approved vaccine from someone results in a greater chance of hospitalization or death with omicron, because the data on the vaccine already exist, and it would be unethical to do that.
Show me one IRB. anywhere, that would approve such a "clinical trial," and then tell me how you'd run it.
The reason I can make this claim is that we have abundant observational data in its favor:
1. You look, all over the world, at who is hospitalized with covid.
2. You note which people are vaccinated and which are not.
3. You compare rates of hospitalization and death -- vaxxed versus unvaxxed.
4. You see a clear difference: ""vaccinated people are less likely to be hospitalized and die."
5. If you're a scientist and you think these data imply something _other_ than "the most likely explanation is the vaccine is protecting them," you can create your own reasonable, parsimonious, testable hypothesis about why "vaccinated people are less likely to be hospitalized and die." And then you can conduct your own research and tell us your results.
My assertion was/is 'you cannot make the claim you've made without a clinical trial'. As I stated, I do not make the opposite claim (I have said this is unknowable). Not that your view is necessarily wrong, but that it is an opinion not a fact.
Incidentally, the original trials showed no benefit whatsoever in all-cause mortality in the vaccine arms. Perhaps they would have shown some if the participants had been a better representation of the at-risk population. There seems to be, at least for a short while, a small but measurable decrease in COVID illness, although some have argued that this is a result of design/definitions (many in the vaccination arm of study got sick but were not counted because they did not meet the definition of "vaccinated"; they got sick too soon after being injected).
I am not persuaded as you have been by your observations. All of this data is highly poisoned. We were recently told that 70% of COVID hospitalizations in one area of London had nothing to do with COVID whatsoever. We have also learned that some (many? most? all? we don't know) hospitals in the US categorize patients as unvaccinated if they cannot confirm their status conclusively. We do not know if this is 1% or 99% of patients; we are not told. In Alberta specifically, people have to proactively register their status and get a QR code to verify their record in the system. Do you know if hospitals use this to confirm status? What percentage of those 217 unvaccinated patients in Alberta are actually vaccinated but never downloaded their QR codes? I don't know, and the article offers no clues. Maybe this isn't the method of verification and is thus not relevant. More that I don't know.
There are 100 other questions I have that go begging in that article.
I appreciate your articles. I think you are biased like everyone though. I consider what you call "abundant observational data" to be more accurately described as 'a very select few tidbits that will make it easy for you to jump to the conclusion we want you to'.
And of course, I am biased as well, which is why I say, 'I don't know'. In the few cases where I have gotten a look at raw hospital data, I have found extraordinary amounts of massaging, all in one direction. The 70% figure from that one report out of London was not surprise whatsoever to me based on what I have seen firsthand. You might be shocked to learn the number of subclinical COVID+ patients that are in the maternity wards of our hospitals (a highly under-vaccinated sub-group if ever there were one). So, I am biased that we are not getting the full picture, and in an intentional way to manipulate us. I am very happy to be persuaded otherwise, but articles like this leave me with far more questions than answers.
What you said, I thought (and correct me if I'm wrong) is because we can't conduct impossible (because unethical) "clinical trials" we can't know that people who are vaccinated are less likely to be hospitalized and die than unvaccinated people.
And then you say other things that make quite literally no sense.
You say things like the data have been "highly poisoned" without explaining what you mean, and making vague unsupported claims that "we have been told" (by whom? where's the official data?).
You say thing like "hospitals in the US categorize patients as unvaccinated if they cannot confirm their status conclusively" -- and what? That must be a tiny number of people since everyone is entered into a state database and is either in the database or not. If I end up in a hospital unconscious and unable to speak, they'll be able to know my vaccination status by looking.
I can't speak to your unsourced claims about Alberta either since I don't live there. I spoke about the way the information in the article was misinterpreted, based on facts in the article.
Likewise, if there are "100 other questions" -- another unsupported claim -- perhaps you should elucidate them and publish them with supporting data.
I really can't engage with you if you simply deny what I'm saying and then fail to support your own point of view with actual data.
Nothing anyone writes here will make you think the "vaccine" is NOT safe, no matter how many people die because of it, so I'm not sure what's the point of even writing this article.
These therapies (not vaccines) are the deadliest in history, and one has to be obtuse to not see that in the data. What's even the point of arguing in bad faith?
So you can choose to engage and give me your best evidence, because I’m inviting you to share your piece of the elephant.
Or you can prove the point of the post, which is that many people are grasping so tightly to their piece of the elephant that they can’t tolerate adding new information to their understanding of a situation. And that’s a problem.
If you say these things are “deadliest in history” come at me with some data. If I’d have to be “obtuse” not to agree with you, then there’s no harm in you giving it a shot.
This is very good. Your four-teams analysis is spot on. I am very solidly Team Mainstream, but our team captains have been doing an absolutely terrible job of conveying the actual situation (which is filled with uncertainty that our captains have consistently refused to acknowledge).
Thanks Mark. I think it’s a tragedy that the captains of Team Mainstream, who have a lot of “pieces of the elephant,” have assumed the rightness of their views without putting forth the effort to win people over, consider their concerns, or talk plainly and honestly.
In the past (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) we could assume in the face of a national crisis that everyone would be on board. You didn’t have to work very hard to convince them of the rightness of the path ahead. Times have changed, people have very different sources of information, and our leaders need to try much harder.
I really wish we did have the modern-day equivalent of Fireside Chats — although trust is so far eroded now that I’m not sure it would be accepted very readily.
Our leaders needs to try hard to win back the basic trust of the people. Without that, we’re unable to respond effectively.
I have a slightly different take on the captains. I think that they WANT to win people over, it's just that the way they try to do it does not work very well. They talk like scientists talking to other scientists.
Yes. I can see that. Perhaps they have a poor sense of audience? Maybe they don’t know the extent to which the average Joe or Jane (who’s not combing medRxiv daily for the latest covid info) does not have the context.
The people in charge of convincing us to take action don’t understand that when there’s a new development with the masks, for example, they need to explain why that is. Now all of a sudden there’s talk of wearing N95s everywhere when half of America probably wouldn’t know if an N95 bit them in the ass.
The scientists among them can be forgiven for not communicating clearly to the public I suppose. That’s not necessarily their forte, especially if they spend their time in the lab and not at the bedside.
But…isn’t that what we have speechwriters for? Isn’t that why we have politicians— people with a certain amount of rhetorical skill, to convey important information adequately? I wouldn’t count on Biden to convey my sandwich order to Subway.
We definitely need more capable leaders.
I think you are spot on here. They are pressed by the media to say something. And in these situations they cannot simply hedge everything they claim about the virus with twenty caveats (as would be scientifically accurate). If they do hedge their claims the nuances get lost on their way to the headlines.
And there are situtations in which they try to message something consistently, while the evidence is shifting in the background. Then they look like idiots, or worse conspirators.
Still there are people who seem to see the whole elephant.
I don't know what team you would count Zeynep Tufekci on, but in my view, she was the head elephantologist from the get-go.
She called out the unfortunate messaging on mask efficacy in the beginning and continues to be a voice of reason.
I’m not familiar with Zeynap Tufekci (feel free to add a link if you like) but when you were describing that minefield (leaving out the 20 nuances to keep the message simple, and then “losing” either way) I did immediately think of masks.
Okay... Enjoy!
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/233-groves-misinformation
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airborne-transmission.html
and her substack:
https://zeynep.substack.com/
Thanks!
Team Contrarian is the most annoying on most issues. I have a Google doc going about something similar (I have a couple of almost-ready docs, but have never published anything).
I'm really fucking tired of people telling me how edgy their views are. Mundane shit is true all the time.
I would like to see what you have to say! Please publish something and let me know. :)
Safe and effective for covid vaccines is a phrase that has been used almost like a mantra. The original research for the Pfizer vaccine (based on which the EUA was granted) noted that the vaccine is 95% effective at preventing hospitalisations and it's safe in that no major discrepancy in side effects were found between the placebo and the intervention groups.
However, on the safety side, (1) the randomised control trial procedure was questioned, it seems with a bit of evidence (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635) suggesting that some side-effects were not documented and (2) the trial was derandomised - meaning there's no long-term safety data available beyond the first 6 months. Vaccine safety must now be evaluated from observational studies or time-wise comparisons (which all suffer from a major drawback that confounding factors such as psychological pressure and delayed healthcare will have likely contributed to adverse health effects, so causal vaccine-induced adverse effects cannot be easily demonstrated. The lack of data (and evidence) equates to no safety concerns.
I am struggling to understand how and why people who observe discrepancies in vaccine claims vs reality continue to subscribe to the safe and effective mantra. What's the logical link that i am missing?
Your concerns deserve a more thorough and serious reply than I can probably provide in a quick comment-reply, but this is a great example of why we need more discussion and more transparency, so thanks for bringing it up.
There are privately owned places that do clinical trials, and their mission in life is to extract every last dollar out of it. It sounds like Ventavia might be one, where people are just running these clinical trials to make a buck. The people who work there are overworked and trying to do too much, and so you get mistakes that _shouldn't_ happen, but _do_, such as "needles discarded in a plastic biohazard bag instead of a sharps container box [or...] vaccine packaging materials with trial participants’ identification numbers written on them left out in the open, potentially unblinding participants."
None of this is terribly surprising stuff, I have to say (sadly). It's a little bit like working at a restaurant, and seeing someone rinse off a steak they dropped on the floor and serve it; or knowing about the roach problem in the kitchen. It's yucky, but the insiders know these things exist.
Every time you make a mistake in a clinical trial -- even a small one like leaving the list of ID numbers out in the open where someone could potentially see it and unblind the participants -- you're supposed to admit it and document it. Small errors happen all the time, and the paperwork to document everything almost ensures that you're so short on time you will make additional mistakes, so sometimes sadly people gloss over small mistakes and pretend they didn't happen. Say, someone who was supposed to be called back within 24 hours was not called back until a couple days later (but they also had instructions to go to the Emergency Department if anything was wrong) -- you're supposed to document that mistake, with a form. Every little deviation from the written protocol must be documented.
The person who reported all these sloppinesses and mini-failings is saying that these things happened and weren't reported. That's wrong that these things were happening, if true. Not surprising, but wrong, and it does sound more sloppy than average.
But:
1. One sloppy privately owned site that had 1,000 participants of a total of 44,000+ doesn't negate the data, especially since sloppy data obscures positive results (would tend to make the vaccine look less effective, not more).
2. There's no evidence that anyone was harmed (for example, by the sloppy disposal of the needles or a delay in being phoned back). Even the example given of a "Serious adverse reaction" was a " Grade 3 local reactions" which would be basically an extremely itchy or red injection site, enough that it was distracting or bothersome -- hardly a medical emergency left ignored. Still, that person should have been called back timely per the protocol, and it's wrong if s/he wasn't. Does that mean the vaccine didn't work?
3. If anything, the things the person is describing would make the data "less good" -- for example, while it's not likely that anyone was actually unblinded (just some sloppy handling of the lists) someone who _was_ unblinded and knew they didn't get the vaccine would be more likely to avoid situations where they might get sick, and someone who knew they did get the vaccine might go out and party. In both cases, if it changed anything at all, this would make the effect of the vaccine look smaller than it really was, because the person who was unvaxxed would take actions to make it more likely they stayed healthy, and the person who was vaxxed would take actions to make it more likely they got a breakthrough infection. It would make Pfizer's data worse, not better.
Likewise for the other concerns -- they are sloppy but no actual harm is alleged and if anything they would make the data worse:
"Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff [sloppy, because eyeballs should be on them, but no harm was alleged to have occurred from it, and it would have no effect on the vaccine data]
"Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events [doesn't affect the outcome of the trial -- affects the patients if they don't follow the instructions to go to the hospital if they have any problems; otherwise it's just an annoyance to them not to hear back timely, and it has no effect on the vaccine data]
"Protocol deviations not being reported [mentioned above - you're supposed to fill out a form every time you don't call someone back quickly enough, etc.]
"Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures [would make vaccine less effective]
"Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and [wrong and sloppy, but would not affect the vaccine outcomes]
"Targeting of Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems." [wrong, but unrelated to outcomes]
Overall, the sum of the problems make it sound to me like a place that was run more poorly than average but didn't ultimately affect the data or any patients' safety. If anything, it would have made Pfizer's data worse, and Pfizer has no incentive to encourage any of those practices, because they want their data to be as clean as possible. Clean data are the data that can show effects clearly. Fortunately this place was only one of 153 sites for the trial.
I'm no fan of Pfizer by the way -- at all. I'm just saying this BMJ article is interesting for what it reveals about this particular place, but it really, in my honest estimation, has no bearing on the clinical trial results. I think those privately owned clinical trial places suck, too -- this type of work should not be done for profit. But the fact remains that this vaccine worked well against the original virus.
As for your other concern, I think you are referring to this, from the 6 month safety and efficacy report here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.full.pdf
"Duration of protection and safety data that could be collected in a blinded, placebo-controlled manner were limited by the ethical and practical need to immunize eligible initial placebo recipients under EUA and according to public health authority recommendations."
This is something that happens routinely when you have a really effective drug or vaccine. When your participants, who volunteered to help humankind and agreed to take a certain amount of risk onto themselves, are revealed to have had the placebo, they get to have the "real vaccine" because it would be unethical not to offer it.
This is not something sneaky or unusual that Pfizer did or the FDA did. It's what happens in this exact situation.
I'm not sure what long-term side effects would not be documented, however? What are you thinking this would not catch, if these people are still followed up? They will not be compared any longer to a blinded placebo group (but what good is continued blinding after 6 months?), but they can still be compared to everyone who is not vaxxed, or everyone who received a different type of vax.
You've got 44,000 adults who got the vaccine, and you've got epidemiological data for expected rates of disease for every condition known to humankind. You can easily see if there's any "long-term" signal at this point without your placebo group.
If you also consider the fact that vaccines don't have "long term effects" longer than about 4-6 weeks -- ever, in the history of vaccines, except for antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) which is simply not a concern with coronaviruses, then it would have been even more unethical not to offer the vaccine to the placebo group, because you have no reason to suppose that any "long term effects" will occur with vaccines (which is unlike a lot of drugs).
I hope this helps a little.
Thank you for taking the time to write up such a lengthy explanation. I really appreciate it.
Most of the response on protocol deviations has been centred around potential medical implications. I'm not disputing those, you likely have a better understanding of medicine than me. However, most of this vaccine research has little to do with medicine and more to do with statistics. The double-blind randomised control trial (RCT) doesn't investigate vaccine operating mechanisms, rather it statistically analyses the results of an intervention against a baseline. In other words, i don't care how the vaccine works, I only care if i can extract a statistical difference.
The main claim to fame of the double-blind randomised control trial (RCT) methodology is that they eliminate the inherent human bias in sampling and data collection through a strict protocol. Sample idiosyncrasies are spread randomly and in a balanced way across the control and treatment, the personnel administering the treatment behave in a similar manner with subjects in either group, recording information in the same way for both etc. Randomised control trials as a methodology, although mainly applied in medicine, are not necessarily field-restricted (there's a fun article about why we don't do RCT to parachute use https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14684649/). The strict trial protocol is the thing that gives RCT power, because it eliminates human bias.
When evidence comes to light that the protocol may have been (not necessarily deliberately) broken in ways that the core strength of the methodology - i.e. the double blind aspect - was potentially compromised, the data emerging from this analysis have questionable reliability. In other words, if you follow this method you should get reliable results, but if you don't follow it, why should your results still be reliable. So either breaking protocol invalidates results or the method is useless (because breaking it doesn't invalidate the results). To bring that into context, the CDC has consistently said that the vaccines have undergone a rigorous testing process. The BMJ paper suggests the process wasn't that rigorous. And the rigor of the protocol is the main (if not the only) selling point of these vaccines.
On the side effects issue, after vaccinating 70, 80, 90, 95, 97% of population it's difficult to see long-term signals because of the lack of comparison group and confounding factors. In Australia for example, 95-97% of adults over 18 are vaccinated. There's no control group with which to compare long-term health outcomes. How can you find out if there's been an increase in heart problems associated with the vaccine if you can't compare the prevalence of heart disease in a control group?
The only point of analysis remains comparison with historical data. The problem with that analysis are confounding factors. For example, this recent news piece revealed all cause mortality in Indiana went up 40% (https://americanbuddhist.net/2022/01/03/all-cause-mortality-up-40-for-18-64-year-olds-in-indiana/). Is this the vaccine? Who knows - access to medical care has been restricted for a while, lockdowns have contributed to making people lonelier and potentially more disillusioned etc. In the absence of an unvaccinated control group, all analysis is basically interpretation which can vary depending on the scientist's prior beliefs.
I understand that prior research on vaccines shows that they dont have effects longer than 4-6 weeks but most covid vaccines aren't traditional ones. Do they have fewer or more side effects? I definitely don't know - all i'm concerned about is that we're making it impossible to tell.
Given the case of Maddie de Garay, all the “data” is very suspect.
How can one case counter data? This is an anecdote. An anecdote is not data. I have received three vaccinations and I am now at home with Covid19 coughing my lungs out. Does this mean the vaccines don't work? No. Because it's an anecdote. My one experience does not prove or disprove anything. How can it?
These discussions are exhausting because they remind me of flat earthers who are walking the land with a spirit level and are not able to measure the curvature of the earth.
Only because you cannot measure the curvature of the earth with a spirit level does not mean the earth is flat.
Only because there is one girl whose parent's claim their daughter has weird symptoms after a vaccine trial does not mean the vaccine is unsafe.
There are people who claim they are not eating and living off sunlight for 20 years.
What do you conclude from that? That food is a lie? No!
There are psychological studies that "prove" precognition. Does it mean prognition is real? No!
The whole point of science is that it is an edifice built by many people together. It can therefore transcend the biases and false intuitions of the individuals. If everybody just observed the world before him and drew conclusions from it there would be no progress whatsoever. This does not mean that you have to blindly trust scientists but you have to at least understand the scientific method to give meaningful criticism.
In a situation where we knew very little about a new virus every new pre-print and study was manicly catapulted into the media maelstrom. Many people who never read scientific studies before are now combing through this as if they would find the truth hidden in some obscure table in an appendix.
But one "Maddie" proves nothing. One appendix of a study proves nothing. One study proves nothing.
Science might be tedious, contradictory and unintuitive. But the very fact you are reading this on an electronic device proves that it works.
I agree, and I hope I’m not being overly optimistic that even non-scientists can think somewhat like scientists when evaluating competing claims.
Also I’m sorry to hear you have covid! I hope you are feeling better soon!!
To me, the biggest problem is not that people disagree but that —much more fundamentally— we can’t seem to agree on a set of basic underlying facts.
When someone presents one really odd case and is ready for that to weigh more heavily than all the other mountains of information we have, where do we go next?
Or when someone says (in a different comment) this vaccine is “the deadliest ever” how do we start to have a conversation?
If we can all agree on a basic set of facts, we can discuss it. I want to know how many people have died because of this vaccine. Everyone should want to know. Where’s the information?
It’s hard when, for example, someone told me this morning (not on here) that “everyone” she knows who got an mRNA vaccine was “sick for at least a week.”
How do you begin a discussion with someone who makes that claim? First you want to know— how many people does she know who got vaccinated? But it’s hard to ask that question without seeming as if you doubt her claim. (Did she know only only one person and that person got sick? I would bet the farm that she doesn’t know three people who got sick for a week.)
But how can you even enter into that conversation without making it sound that you think the person is confused or dealing with only one or two anecdotes at best, or is exaggerating or lying at worst?
I know many hundreds of people who got the vaccine. Most were either “a little sore” and nothing else or had a day of feeling run down or feverish which is to be expected because your body is responding to the thing which doesn’t belong there. One person I know was down with symptoms for two days. One person I know was down for three days, with all three doses.
So this person’s set of facts (everyone sick for a week) and my set of facts (most people nothing or sick for a day) are so different — as you say, they’re just anecdotes and not data.
So how do we choose which represents reality better? We turn away from our anecdotes and look at the bigger picture. Scientists follow tens of thousands of people and note their symptoms and tell us whether “a day of feeling run down” or “at least a week of being sick” is the more typical experience.
I’m really interested in how, in our everyday conversations, we can determine where we agree on basic facts.
With Maddie, everyone probably agrees she was in the vaccine trial. Everyone probably agrees that she has a lot of bad symptoms. Everyone agrees it’s terrible to see a child and her family suffering. Everyone agrees the symptoms need to be explained, not just for the child’s benefit but for the public’s benefit. Everyone agrees we want to know if the vaccine is safe or not.
It’s almost as if, in these conversations, sometimes people assume bad intentions when there’s no logical basis for it.
For example, why would anyone _not_ want to know if these vaccines are dangerous? Why would anyone want it to be covered up if the vaccine harmed this child?What would the vaccine maker stand to gain, by continuing to give a harmful vaccine? Think about how quickly Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine’s problems were recognized, how quickly warnings went out, and how soon thereafter the vaccine’s use was discouraged.
If people believe this is a big coverup, how do they explain the motivations for the coverup? Is it just evil villains promoting a harmful vaccine for fun?
We’re all need to agree on those facts. Then we can discuss what those facts mean.
I just deleted a long reply because it was redundant to your points. So let me just say: Thanks for your thoughtful answer. I mostly agree.
I do not share your optimistic outlook because it assumes a common interest in the project of the Enlightenment.
People want to believe alternative and contrarian explanations because they have little to contribute to the advancement of science. Science has become so fragmented and specialized that you have to study for your whole life to contribute some tiny speck of knowledge.
The elephant is already well-known, its genome is mapped and its anatomy is described to the smallest detail. Little can you contribute as a blind man grasping at it.
But if you are on an online forum where you can decipher a secret message from Q and find out about a diabolic cabal of child molesters. That's something different. You are elbow-deep in the shit of the elephant, but at least you are contributing something.
Well, Tilman, now you have succeeded in depressing me. (ha ha)
So...you're saying a part of our problem is the problem of hyperspecialization, so that we are all off in our niche contributing our tiny speck of knowledge? And perhaps we are so hyperspecialized that we don't communicate well with others? (Or perhaps we can communicate well, but only with others in our sub-sub-sub field? Or...?)
Most of the people arguing online, though, aren't in a sub-sub-sub field (or part of science or academia at all), so they didn't get that mindset from hyperspecialization (I'm guessing).
Most of the people arguing online are no longer getting their basic information about the world from the same few consistent sources (as Matt Taibbi describes in Hate Inc.). In earlier decades, the news had to appeal to everyone: people of all age groups, ethnic groups, social classes, political leanings.
Now it's all very niche. Instead of informing us more or less neutrally about current world events, the news is meant to appeal to our personal sensibilities.
Did you see the documentary The Social Dilemma? To me, that seems to account for the fragmented state of knowledge we see in the public sphere.
Thanks to social media algorithms, which give us more of whatever keeps us online (which are often things that induce fear or outrage) we have very fragmented, niche, and wildly different sources of "information."
Some people are kept online by reading stories of "anti-vaxxers" and how they are prolonging the pandemic. The come to believe the "anti-vaxxers" are the biggest jerks (or ignoramuses) in the world.
Other people are kept online by reading stories of horrible vaccine outcomes. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not, but if if keeps them reading, their algorithm will send them stories of horrible vaccine outcomes, and then this becomes something that they've "read everywhere" and therefore believe absolutely.
And so on.
As a consequence, there are several different versions of "reality" now, without a common source of news to ground us in a common set of facts. And each person believes in one or another of the versions, and the versions of reality don't agree, and we can't even address a global disaster effectively.
If someone who believes that vaccines are killing children encounters someone who thinks vaccines are not killing children, they are predisposed to think that person is an idiot or a monster or in league with the pharmaceutical companies.
It's a real barrier to sensemaking and developing good policies.
My Lab Leak 2.0 story of course was put forward as a good faith hypothesis, to get people talking about GoF and to think about whether -- whatever really happened -- this risky research is worth potentially killing millions of people and disrupting all our lives for years. And important topic right? And one which needs to be taken seriously, regardless of what you think of the specific hypothesis I put out there.
But I got a lot of people responding who believe so many other odd things, and it's hard to imagine harnessing that energy for the common good. If they don't want to meet someone from another "team" halfway and listen to their version of events, and respond to their data and information, then we're going to stay divided, and dare I say, remain collectively more ignorant as a result.
It's very disheartening.
Yes you are right, most people who are arguing online are not working in a hyperspecialized field of science. And that is why there is a growing disconnect between what people argue about and what is known to be a scientific fact.
In 1781 William Herrschel discovered Uranus with a self-made telescope while working a day-job as a musician. What can I contribute to science today with a self-made telescope? Nothing.
But while they cannot contribute a lot, people can have an opinion on any topic now. They look it up online and gobble up whatever their social media bubble spits at them.
When Drosten, the German Dr.Fauci, was asked about Influenca, he said: "well, I am an expert on coronaviruses, not on influenca, so take my statements with a grain of salt."
When you ask Karlheinz, from the street protests in front of the Parliament, you can be sure he knows for a fact that influenca is much more dangerous than covid-19.
Now to be clear, that's not only Karlheinz's fault. It's also a failure of science communication. The detachment goes both ways. When Drosten was asked about GoF research, he said something along the lines of: well the experts know how to do this properly, while the non-experts are just being emotional (yes, that's a very uncharitable summary, he was much more careful, but it could easily be understood that way).
There is certainly room for someone between these two worlds who can take concerns seriously and bridge this gap.
I have not seen the documentary you mention yet, but it's on Netflix right? I'll watch it the next weeks while quarantined.
And thanks for the wishes, my symptoms are not that bad. But now the rest of my family caught it...
Oh no! I wish all your family good health as well! May everyone recover quickly and completely! And I hope you "enjoy" some of your quarantined time, even though that sounds like a weird thing to say. If I had two weeks off from my "day job" I'd do a lot of reading.
Yes the movie is on Netflix if you have a chance to watch it. I think it is very worthwhile.
This comment really struck me: "In 1781 William Herrschel discovered Uranus with a self-made telescope while working a day-job as a musician. What can I contribute to science today with a self-made telescope? Nothing." Yes, wow. Exactly. I see your earlier point in sharper focus now!!!!
So this is a very interesting coincidence: I just read a long interview with Drosten within the last few days and now I can't remember why I was reading that particular interview, but he seemed rather, yes, cavalier about GoF. Or, maybe it's not a coincidence -- maybe you sent me the link, and I don't remember! I try to read many things which are recommended by other people, and then I forget who recommended them!
But tell me: Do you think the messaging in Germany is equally inadequate? Perhaps I pick on the US too much, and think our faults are unique. I thought it was a complete disaster that this occurred while Trump was in office. Any other leader, I believe, would have tried to bring everyone together, but he is such a petty, self-involved little man that he politicized the issue, and brought his own special brand of ignorance to the crisis. Once it was so badly politicized, no one else had a chance to undo that damage. Not that I'm a fan of Biden either.
This is very misguided. First of all, you don't comprehend that all such data is inherently "anecdotal" -- every patient that comes into a doctor/scientist is an "anecdote", which when analyzed properly yield patterns. If you eliminate anecdotal data then you have no data.
Single anecdotes are often not strongly indicative, but in this case the single anecdote is strong enough to bring into question the integrity of Pfizer's process, just as a single rape case can be strong enough to send someone to prison for life. Such cases should be subject to an active judicial process, not dismissed on pseudoscientific reasoning, as you're doing.
Yes, many anecdotes, if "analyzed properly" might yield patterns. I have never doubted that. But you are talking about ONE case. How can you "yield a pattern" from one case on which you do not have reliable information, just some propaganda videos financed by a notorious anti-vaxxer.
Like I said, I can cite you some cases of people who claim they are living off sunlight for decades. There are people who claim to have gotten morgellons from masks. So what? this is simply not convincing.
And I do not see how this weird rape analogy or a judicial process does apply to anything.
Scientific truth is not established by a judicial process. I don't even understand where you're coming from here.
I never indicated you "doubted" that. Point is you're fixated on that.
Rape is a single "anecdote": a girl comes in and claims such and such happened to her, not necessarily having any evidence except her own reports. The same is the case with Maddie and her mom, they have claims. These claims should be evaluated properly, and they're simply being ignored.
Judicial process is relevant because their overall claims imply fraud, which is criminal. If they are telling us the truth, the Pfizer/FDA hid adverse event data from us. Such claims should be seriously considered and evaluated by a transparent process, not dismissed like you are doing, which is perfectly analogous to dismissing someone's rape claims.
The mum was on Tucker Carlson and has lawyers pursuing her case. I'd hardly call this "being ignored". The Salonnière pointed out that the public does know only one side of the story because the doctors and lawyers are not able to talk freely about this.
Believable claims warrant investigation. And I have no reason to believe this standard is not being applied here.
One such claim however is not reason to assume widespread fraud.
Did you immediately assume that public lynchings are taking place in Chicago once you heard Jussie Smollets claims?
A bit of skepticism is not a bad thing, especially regarding the fact that I can only find information on Maddie on very very weird websites.
You misunderstand what I meant by "ignored." I meant that the pertinent institutions that should have been transparently dealing with her case have been ignoring it.
"doctors and lawyers are not able to talk freely about this"
You say that as if it's somehow exonerating. Why are they allegedly not able to?
I’ve read what I can find about Maddie de Garay and I admit I’m confused by it.
There doesn’t seem to be a hypothesized _mechanism_ related to the vaccine for this set of symptoms to be happening to her.
For example, we know why the vaccine does some other rare things, like cause anaphylaxis or rare myocarditis. We understand how they occur. But we don’t know why or how, even hypothetically, such a weird assortment of symptoms happened to this poor kid.
So, I understand why some people are saying it’s psychogenic. Kids have psychogenic illnesses more often than you might think, and sometimes really dramatic stuff too, like seizures or not being able to walk.
On the other hand, you can’t just write it off right? It needs to be examined and discussed and the full truth needs to come out publicly and openly. To hide it creates fear. And the stakes are high: we’re talking about vaccines being given to kids, so the public wants a full accounting.
On the third hand, the _only_ things that you’re going to hear are the things that the family chooses to reveal. You can’t reveal someone else’s medical information, right? There’s HIPAA.
So… suppose Maddie is not able to walk. And suppose the doctors do some tests and find there’s no physical reason she can’t walk. Well, they can’t go on the news and say so. And Maddie’s family is not saying (for example) “here is the diagnosis and here are the medical tests showing what’s physically wrong.” So is there anything physically wrong? And if so, is there any reasonable way it’s related to what the vaccine is capable of doing?
If I twirl three times and get dizzy, we know sometimes that happens and we understand why, physically. But if I twirl three times and then the next day my hair starts falling out, is there any hypothetical way the twirling caused the hair loss? That’s what I’m getting at.
For a doctor to suggest a child’s health problems are psychogenic — especially when the child seems very sincerely to be suffering (ie, she is not making it up) is often received very poorly by the family. You can understand why, especially if the symptoms are dramatic and the parents suspect the doctors’ actions might have harmed her.
But if the doctors claimed (as I read in a couple of places) that this was “anxiety” (psychogenic), then you can be pretty sure that the family and their assortment of doctors have not been able to demonstrate there’s any physical damage.
You should be able to see why someone can’t walk, for example. You should be able to see (say) spinal cord damage.
There’s something extremely incomplete — on both sides — about the stories being told. The “vaccine side” seems to want to hush it up, which is not a good idea, but they are limited in what they can say publicly. It’s natural they don’t want to be subject to one-sided accusations. Maddie’s family seems not to present anything very specific. What specific things are physically wrong? Where is the damage, physically? By what mechanism could the vaccine have done these dramatic things and why has it not done that to other people, ever, in the billions of other doses given?
I hate to say anything about a sick kid, because I genuinely feel sad for her and I wish wholeheartedly that she were not suffering, but something about this story is _missing_.
We just don’t know what. Until we do know, it’s hard to know what Maddie’s story tells us. It needs to be discussed more openly. That’s probably something everyone can agree on. I hope she’ll be OK.
I think you need to do some deep soul-searching. You are dismissing the evidence right in front of you on the grounds of figments of your imagination (your "hypotheses" of alternative explanations than the evident one). Meanwhile, a little girl's life has been destroyed.
We should certainly assume Maddie and her mom are telling the truth, at least until such time as the system that so abused them have explained themselves satisfactorily and given us a REAL basis to dismiss it like you're doing. Instead they say nothing about her case, and they will not return calls.
I wish you well. I feel terrible for this child.
How am I dismissing it? I say we need to understand it and currently we don’t understand it.
Do we agree? No one knows what caused her symptoms? One hypothesis is psychogenic. That’s not an insult. This can presumably be ruled out if physical problems are present. I’m not saying what it is or is not, because I don’t know.
I’d very much like to know what is causing her paralysis and presumably if there’s a physical cause, it can be shown by existing technologies.
I’m confident that if this child has physical problems, she can find doctors to help her, and if those physical problems relate to the vaccine, I’m sure she can find lawyers to help her. If that’s the case, I hope she and her family get compensation.
Whatever her condition, I feel very sorry for this child and for her loved ones. It’s tragic.
If anyone has information about her physical problems (such as spinal cord damage causing paralysis) and/or information about how her symptoms hypothetically relate to anything in the vaccines, I’m here to listen to it with an open mind at any time. I’m not dismissing anything. I’d really like to know. We need to know and to understand it.
I don’t know what happened to her. Neither do you. The most we can say is that it seems very odd and needs to be explained. Do we agree?
As for any other documented problems that occurred in other people, including the ones that are so rare that we even don’t know whether they are linked to the vaccine yet (such as autoimmune liver disease) or whether they are part of natural base rates (meaning a certain small number of people develop every physical condition regardless of whether they got a vaccine), at least in those cases we know how —hypothetically— a vaccine can cause an autoimmune reaction, which is why articles are written about the various autoimmune cases. Everyone wants to keep an eye on those.
Likewise we know how a vaccine can hypothetically cause myocarditis. So we’re looking at that carefully.
Unfortunately, for this set of symptoms, no one has a hypothesis for how Maddie’s symptoms could relate to anything the vaccine is capable of. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It seems unlikely, but again: I don’t know and neither do you. So I keep an open mind until we have more information.
I’m not saying anyone is lying or acting in bad faith. I’m saying her case is bizarre and deserves attention but doesn’t seem to fit in rationally with anything the vaccine might reasonably do.
Even if this could eventually be said to be linked to the vaccines, then it occurs as a one-in-9-billion event (once among the number of doses given worldwide) and would not be a reason to take the benefit of the vaccine away from everyone else.
That might sound callous but it’s not. If you take the vaccine away for a one-in-9-billion event you are killing at least hundreds of thousands, probably millions, more.
The only question you need to ask/answer is whether her reports/complaints were handled correctly or not. The evidence is "not."
https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/fda-buries-data-on-seriously-injured
https://aaronsiri.substack.com/p/federal-health-authorities-ignore
Fortunately we now have data from 5 million children being vaccinated.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cdc-director-rochelle-walensky-concerns-myocarditis-million-children/story?id=81659883
We haven’t seen another case like Maddie’s. If this were, as your link suggested, a 1 in 1000 event, we’d have 5,000 Maddies by now in the news. Word would get around.
It sounds like the doctors and the FDA made the right call on this.
If the Maddie de Garay case is as it appears (clinical trial fraud), then you can't trust their data, period. We have to get to the bottom of that.
But even if we could trust their data, what is the actual long-term risk vs. benefit *for the kids* in giving the vax to them? Everything I've seen, even the official data, says there it's exactly the wrong call to be giving to to them. And the substance of the data (that I've seen) is mere increase of antibody titers, not which is not an objective benefit.
In other words, fraudulent.
Recently, new-onset autoimmune phenomena after COVID-19 vaccination have been reported increasingly (e.g. immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, autoimmune liver diseases, Guillain-Barré syndrome, IgA nephropathy, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34957554/.
We'll learn enough only when it's too late.
Reading the article in full is the way to go, so you know what they're talking about. These are the disorders noted:
Vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia is associated with the adenovirus vaccines (not the mRNA vaccines).
Low platelets (very rare, could be associated with the mRNA vaccines--the article describes 5 cases, making this much less than a one-in-a-million event, if it's related at all)
Liver disease, probably exacerbated by pregnancy and/or drug use (unclear whether vaccines are related at all, and the authors say this, because it's so rare)
Guillain Barre (associated with the adenovirus vaccines, not the mRNA vaccines)
Autoimmune kidney disease -- so rare it's not clear whether it's related to the vaccines at all.
inflammatory arthritis -- rare, associated possibly with vaccines that are not given in the US, and those are not mRNA vaccines
lupus -- based on a single case report and _not_ associated with an mRNA vaccine
Reading this article in full actually reassured me a lot. The mRNA vaccines are much safer than older kinds of vaccines. For example, if the liver disease were a one-in-a-million event, we'd have hundreds of case reports in the US by now, enough to tell that there's a rare chance of getting it. But we have so few case reports that the authors can't even tell if there's a relationship.
Reading the full article is usually the best way to go, so you get full information.
VAERS data flatly contradicts you.
These vaccines (all of them) are the perfect recipe for autoimmune problems, as they quite literally instruct the body to attack itself. It would be very surprising if they did not cause autoimmune problems.
I will do a post on VAERS sometime when I have the time to delve into it and do it justice.
Since I'd probably get put on "Team Contrarian" let me make a few points about my position that you didn't.
(1) Good guys don't censor, that's what people like Nazis do. The good guys engage contrarians, they don't shut them down and lock them out. Censorship is step 1 of genocide, and we are living through a genocide against contrarians, the same old story of Socrates being forced to drink the hemlock. If you support censorship then I'm not going to consider you trustworthy, I will think that you are either too stupid to comprehend such principles or are actively genocidal.
(2) If you support infringing the standard doctor-patient relation and using institutional power to block alternative treatments like HCQ and ivermectin then I'll likewise either consider you too stupid to understand why it's a good thing that we've always had "off label treatment" left to individual doctor discretion, or I'll consider you actively genocidal.
Really I think this is "Team Ethical" not "Team Contrarian", because these ethical norms being violated in front of us are not hard to understand. If the significance of this absolutely evil violation of these norms is lost on you, then something is very very wrong with you. Ergo the "contrarian" explanation that you're involved in some kind of "mass formation psychosis."
So I see you’re grasping your piece of the elephant pretty tightly and you don’t seem to want to engage with people who have different pieces. Therefore I’m not sure how to respond to you. You’ve not left room for anyone else’s ideas. Be well, though.
No, but you are grasping your inapplicable metaphor pretty tightly. If you can't explain why my ethical principles are misguided, the problem is with you. I on the other hand am totally open to engaging any idea, even wrongheaded ones like yours.
What do you mean that I have to “explain why [your] ethical principles are misguided”? To me this has nothing to do with your ethical principles and everything to do with what is factually true.
Exactly what are you claiming that I'm "grasping" "tightly"? I'm the one that's open to debate here, you're the one walking off the field at the first brush of difficulty.
If by "walking off the field" you mean I have a day job and can't spend all day engaging with any one commenter on my (free) substack, yeah, I "walked off the field."
I have addressed all your points, and so has Tilman, and yet you don't have a narrative that makes any sense, nor can you answer any of the commonsense questions that need to be answered if you want to support the claim that this vaccine did anything to this unfortunate child, who I hope will be well. I wish you well as well. I haven't seen you offer anything substantial. If you do have something substantial to offer at a later time, I'll be glad to revisit it.
I also love that parable, and like so many old parables, it would be easy to gloss over the profundity of it.
I am 100% a person who had real, visceral dread about Tr*mp. Lol see even with the asterisk? He who must not be named. I STILL think he is a horrible person, a bad leader, and untrustworthy as fuck. I no longer think every single thing he did was total garbage, necessarily. For instance, the shut down of travel made logical sense to me. And instead of making a logical explanation for why travel bans *didn’t* make sense, all I got was “racism!” I’m like, he is a racist, but that doesn’t make this one thing racist by default.
All this is to say the pandemic has made me slow down and start listening to people holding other bits of the elephant. I hope whatever it is I’m touching is the nose or the tail, if you follow me.
Haha!
Yes! I truly disliked the guy too, because I thought he was not temperamentally or intelllectually capable of leading us well, but yes, not everything a racist guy does is racist (for example, as you said).
I struggle to find nice things to say about him, but I try if for no other reason to remind myself that no one is a total monster, so:
He threw a ton of money at vaccine development, which was a good thing.
Everyone who sees the wisdom behind “figuring out the elephant” needs to spread the word. We’ve absolutely got to collaborate even with people who disagree with us and hash out our disagreements from a more rational and thoughtful perspective.
(member of Team Tribeless/Contrarian)
Start reading from PDF page 17. You will want to rotate it in the PDF viewer to preserve sanity. And yes, the sourcing organization is not reliable and the author of the top-level document has chosen his agenda. Against all odds, I'd like to see a cogent discussion of the underlying source material.
EDIT: easier to read version
https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/4NFC6M83ewzKLf6DvAygb4/0cf477f75646e718afb332b7ac6c3cd1/defuse-proposal_watermark_Redacted.pdf
https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/2mVob3c1aDd8CNvVnyei6n/95af7dbfd2958d4c2b8494048b4889b5/JAG_Docs_pt1_Og_WATERMARK_OVER_Redacted.pdf
I will look at this (just scrolled through). Yeah the initial letter looks kind of fake -- a "vaccine for bats" that is very fond of human ACE2 receptors, right? To spray in caves? I'm interested to know the back-story of these documents and where they came from. Thanks for sharing. It's definitely a compelling topic that would be great to discuss. Thanks!
Yea the author of the intro docs (Major Murphy) misinterprets and overplays the source material that starts on page 17. But that source material is still very interesting, if legit.
The two phases of research (mainly from Executive Summary on 17):
1) Find bat virus that show potential to cause SARS-like disease (spillover to humans)
2) Boost immune response in bats, which ordinarily would not clear the virus, to eliminate those found in (1). This would use the original bat spike found in the wild, not any spikes that evolved in phase 1 research. I'm ignoring this.
The way they go about #1 is somewhere between concerning and idiotic, if I understand correctly...
Bat bACE2 is not equal to human hACE2. But we've already found some bACE2 spike that can (inefficiently) infect human tissue in vitro (these are referenced top right of PDF p. 19):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHC014-CoV
Now look at PDF p. 21, right column starting at "Experimental assays of SARSr-CoV QS jump potential..."
- They first use modelling to identify candidates
- Then they play with them using in vitro cultures and in vivo mice expressing hACE2 (PDF p. 22) and let's see what happens!
Just in case that doesn't get interesting, let's try synthetic modifications and throw those in the humanized mice too (PDF p. 22). Aren't we just begging for SARS-CoV-2 at this point?
This is when you want to check the date on this proposal. PDF page 16, circa 2018.
As to authenticity of the docs themselves, coming via Project Veritas smells. Badly. But who else would publish them? Maybe The Intercept?
Edit: the originating Veritas article:
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/military-documents-about-gain-of-function-contradict-fauci-testimony-under/
Edit 2: this was originally leaked by DRASTIC, the only addition by Veritas is Major Murphy's report:
https://drasticresearch.org/2021/09/21/the-defuse-project-documents/
For what it's worth, MURPHY, JOSEPH P. confirmed to have a fellowship at DARPA:
https://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/Messages-Display/Article/2033048/fy20-commandants-professional-intermediate-level-education-board-results/
It’s interesting, that’s for sure. Will take a closer look when I can.
Just some random tangent to say something nice:
I like the depictions of this fable you found.
Some weeks ago i was seeing a mute storyteller with my sons. He was telling the story of the elephant in a combination of sign language and pantomime. That was really cool.
That sounds very cool indeed!
Love the parable about the blind men and the elephant. It's a good summation of the Covid information stories you get from the different quarters. Nice job.
Thanks so much, Shawn! I love the parable too and am really happy it resonates with others as well.
I liked your description of the “teams”. It’s a really good way to capture the tribal aspect of what is happening.
My quick reaction, though, is that you neglected one of the main points about Team Mainstream. They are the ones who have gone into hysteria mode, to the point of mandates and vaccine passports. They are the ones who are committed to forcing their views on everyone else, no matter the damage, especially to children. Look at what is happening in Australia, Canada, and much of Europe. They seem to be losing their grip on the concepts of Western Civilization.
I do agree that any group that’s in charge tends to force its views on the others. Right now though, I’m not seeing broad mandates (except for some health care jobs) and passports (except for some very local laws, eg NYC and LA) here in the States.
I’m not sure I’d categorize Team Mainstream as hysterical overall. The few people who are very afraid _do_ tend to find their allies among those who promote vaccines and targeted closures during hospital-crashing surges, as opposed to the other groups. Maybe they’re a fifth Team— those who are really afraid for whatever reason? Team Fearful? But I don’t think “hysterical” fits Team Mainstream, just as “ignorant” doesn’t fit some of the other teams (which is often Team Mainstream’s way of dismissing everyone else)! :)
I'm puzzled how you would not consider the OSHA rules currently under review by SCOTUS to be a broad mandate? If the mandates do not come to pass, it will not be for lack of trying by Team Mainstream.
And the vaccine passports may be local, in the sense that only some cities have them, but NYC, LA and Chicago are the largest cities in the country. They are not confined to some backwater towns.
You have a good point. I’ve been assuming that SCOTUS won’t go along with it. Maybe I’m wrong.
And you make a good point that these are not backwaters. My own biases might be coming into play here. In enormous cities, I think it makes good sense to limit large public events to the vaccinated, so maybe my impulse is just to justify it as a good idea without thinking about it too hard.
Why do you think those are bad ideas? Would any vaccine requirements be appropriate ever?
I don't know that I would be opposed to any vaccine requirement ever. I don't think this situation rises to the level of requiring such drastic measures.
First, let me say that I have been vaccinated. I am not an anti-vaxxer in general. We all know and acknowledge that the vaccines do not stop transmission. An unvaccinated person does not represent any more danger in terms of transmission than a vaccinated person. It makes no sense to me to mandate a vaccine that does not stop transmission. I also don't like mandating a vaccine for which we do not yet have long term data. Why should vaccines be required for children, who have almost zero risk from the virus? Or for those who have natural immunity? What about focusing on developing therapeutics?
But most of all, I think it is very dangerous to sanction (enthusiastically) the creation of a category of "outcasts" in society. That kind of thinking has never led anywhere good. I fear it will be more destructive than COVID in the long run.
I agree with you about creating outcasts: and some people indeed treat the unvaxxed as outcasts. No. That’s just wrong.
I disagree about transmission. Here’s my best understanding. Originally, back when the vaccines worked 95% against the earlier virus, we were told there was almost no transmission (except for the rare breakthrough cases).
Now that we’re dealing with a less effective vaccine and more chance of breakthroughs, there’s more transmission of course: infected>>>transmission. But there’s still less among vaccinated people. I believe the linked news article even mentions that, although maybe I’m mixing up my news articles.
Re long-term data, we disagree. Drugs of many kinds _can_ cause long-term effects. For instance, ibuprofen can damage your kidneys. But there’s never been a case of a vaccine causing a long-term effect (except for antibody dependent enhancement which is not a concern with coronaviruses). Vaccines do their thing very briefly and they’re gone. They don’t have effects, ever, more than 4-6 weeks after being given. We have billions of doses, millions of which were given a over a year ago. We’re well beyond the 4-6 week window. Just like every other vaccine in history, the effects are short-term, mainly related to inflammation which is part of the immune response prompted by the vaccine. There is no concern about long-term effects. That’s one of many things that has been extremely poorly communicated by our experts and leaders.
I agree with you that therapeutics are great. I hope we see more. Those were game-changers for HIV.
To me, if we had a very effective vaccine again, it would make sense to have mandates to save people from themselves and so we could all get on with life, although I’d far prefer people agreeing of their own free will (because they’re convinced of the wisdom of it).
Currently vaccine passports with the less effective vaccines probably don’t make as much sense.
Salonniere, it is more than just some people treating the unvaxxed as outcasts. With mandates and vax passports, they are outcasts BY LAW. That is a huge difference, reminiscent of some very ugly history.
And while these measures will persuade some to get vaccinated, the most likely outcome will be a black market in fake vax cards. And then a program to catch and prosecute cheaters. We would be making criminals out of people who simply want to live their lives. And remember, many of the unvaccinated have already had COVID.
As you can tell, I would put myself on Team Freedom, while recognizing some of the Team Mainstream positions. I do not believe the claimed benefits of forced vaccination outweigh my concerns.
As a last note, when I see people who are healthy enough to stand for hours in a line to get tested, I do think that there is hysteria involved.
Continuation of comments on prior piece
Like the elephant analogy. The "blind" and "ability to access only part of the elephant" premise point back to a question. Why is that so? Why are we stuck groping our corner of the elephant? To me, this is the critical question of our time. The covid elephant story provides the answer. We need to step back and remove the blindfold
The story assumes blind inquisitors. It works for an analogy, but we aren't willfully blind. As discussed, echo chambers strongly contribute to blindness. But why did we recede into Ocho chambers?
There are a million theories about echo chambers, but here's a simple one- lack of trust from traditional information sources. Think about the size and scope of today's federal beuacracy. We hardly ever interact with them. When we do (usually at a state or local level), we certainly don't point to them as bastions of world-class kindness and care. When parents peeked into classrooms courtesy of covid "remote learning" (I chuckle every time is see those words together), they wondered where the three R's went, having been subjugated to issues of real importance such as- does my daughter have to share a locker room with a football team suddenly realizing their jocks were protecting figurative vaginas instead of family jewels? Firsthand transparency changed a l ot of minds pretty quickly
But we rarely, if ever, interact with the federal government, even as a business owner. It's a dreadful experience, trust me. Though who's in charge does make a difference, the motto, "less is more" applies across any administration. The point is, we have almost no firsthand knowledge, gained from experience, to have any idea what the heck is going on federally. It stays that way, until something like covid comes along
For argument's sake, let's pretend the virus has some connection to the grant we issued to the WIV. This grant represents such a small domain in the grand scheme of our fed we have no hope of getting to scratch that part of the elephant. Moreover, if we did have that chance, who's going to volunteer to stick their arm up the elephant's backside to find it?
That dirty job thankfully belongs to the media, a group fully deserving of that particular exam. Except you won't find them doing it. Nor will you find them helping describe any part of the elephant, at least in factual terms. What you will find is the media willfully, gleefully, describing the elephant just as the overlords want you to see it
And that's the key piece. For a long time we believed the story was at least somewhat representative. The examples of removing the blindfold and seeing something entirely different are too numerous to mention. Look no further than covid messaging to see why distrust in media-provided "facts" turned out, well.....not so good for team establishment. And everyone noticed. Uh oh
As people realize they're looking at a hippo instead of the promised elephant, they try to find ways to get better information. And who can blame them? Yet they are blamed, shamed and flogged until, by God, it is an elephant! That isn't the American ethos, however, and the smartest ones in the room are finding that out. Post-virginia, by strange coincidence, the narrative is gently shifting to what contrarians and skeptics have questioned all along. In addition to realizing what a self-own remote learning turned into (those meddling parents!), it seems keeping kids out of school isn't politically popular. The fact that it most hurt the disadvantaged communities it purports to exclusively help completes the failure trifecta
While I agree our information safe havens don't give us the full picture, their very existence indicates a population desperate for better. Perfect is the enemy of better. Perfection always alludes humanity, but we must not allow it to impede better. And forums like Substack, where diverse viewpoints are recognized as enrichment instead of danger, certainly move us toward better
Thanks for your comments! I agree that there is distrust of regular information sources, and that distrust is richly deserved. That sends people looking for other information sources.
It's completely appropriate to look for other info sources, but the social media algorithms, as described in "The Social Dilemma" (documentary) illustrate how something simple like "giving people more of what they want, so they remain online" which is a simple business tactic turns quickly into something pernicious. The goal was just to keep more eyeballs glued to screens, but the result of "feeding people the self-reinforcing narratives that keep them online, regardless of truth" is that people are in their own little camps, each believing they have the "real news" and everyone else is a dummy or a tool of the state.
I think the analogy falls apart if we talk of removing blindfolds, honestly. Everyone of course can come to his or her own conclusion, but to me, part of the beauty of the parable is that we all -- no matter how much we know -- only have a small portion of reality. We have a valuable piece to contribute, but only a piece.
For example, I might know what the pandemic is doing to our local hospitals, but I don't know what the pandemic is doing to hospitals in Iceland or Rwanda. I don't know what the pandemic is doing to plumbers in my region (much less Iceland or Rwanda).
No matter how well we try to learn and see "the big picture" we all have just a tiny piece, and that's why we need to rely on others and talk to them.
I have strong views, say, on childhood vaccination, but I can learn things from other people which might (or on the other hand, might not) make me re-think my views. But, the important thing is approaching the elephant knowing that other people have information that I don't, and being open to accept the information!
For example, something like "remote learning" -- it sucked. I think we can all agree on that. But no one really believed "this will be great for anyone." We closed the schools because it seemed the best of bad options at the time, especially before we had the vaccines.
To me, it comes down to, people made a call to prevent the hospitals from collapsing and to minimize deaths, and one of many bad outcomes from that was that kids missed out on learning (and much more, cooped up in their homes).
But I think it's a mistake to move from a true statement, like "Remote learning really sucked," to assuming that "The people who promoted remote learning in the context of a specific global disaster knew it sucked and did it anyway -- and had bad motives." You know what I mean?
All of us on every team have a tendency to assume bad intent from the others -- partly because our social media algorithms get us to remain online longer if they give us information about "dangers" -- even if the dangers are simply "people who have different opinions."
Good points. Thank you for responding
Forgive me if my comments projected bad intentions onto those who closed school (or anyone else for that matter). While I do believe evidence indicates our educationall system lost focus on families and primary education, that's a discussion for a different day. No matter why they closed schools (and yes there were good reasons at the beginning), the transparency granted to parents via remote learning (among other factors) led to a parental revolt
We have to ask, why is reality so different from what we assumed, from what we've been told? Lack of involvement plays a part. But as you mentioned, even those actively engaged see only a tiny part of it. Everyone understands they can't see the whole elephant; they simply want to know it's an elephant
The parable demonstrates our reliance on others for discovery. We also misinterpret our own discovery due to perspective. Very true. The sheer size of the beast impedes our ability to self-discover
This holds true especially when we encounter something completely unfamiliar and out of sight. Self discovery becomes next to impossible. Our navigation naturally seeks "trustworthy" sources. When those sources prove untrustworthy, we navigate to other sources
We're well served by collective discovery from others with a different perspective. The problem arises when people paid specifically to help us navigate the unknown 1. Willfully provide inaccurate information, 2. Prevent the flow of information between camps, 3. Favor certain camps above others, 4. Berate and cancel the unfavored camps, and 5. Insist you're looking at an elephant, not a hippo
Your commentary on social media and other information sources demonstrates the primary point. Humans gravitate to positive feedback loops. They do so particularly when they encounter cognitive dissonance, largely created when "neutral" sources, time and again, prove to be anything but. Camps turn to information sources they know contain bias. But most in the camp at least recognize it, while the "neutral" sources stubbornly cling to a narrative that casts themselves as worthy arbiters of the elephant grope
Why they do it is less concern to me than exposing the farcical game they play. And it is a dangerous one, as we can plainly see with covid. We have no recourse without transparency and accountability. Lack thereof provides the perfect recipe for government run amok. Welcome to America, omicron
Thanks again for your insight
You failed to mention Ivermectin, a Nobel Prize winning drug proclaimed to be a miracle drug of the same level as aspirin and penicillin, which is used against other viruses, and the mountain of evidence that it is safe and works, yet to refused emergency authorization. This after Fauci claimed they were looking for anything that could slow or stop this virus. Fauci claimed there were no studies. He deliberately equated the drug as for livestock and unsafe, ignoring the billions of doses already safely given to people.
In May of 2021, a study showed that Ivermectin was effective by having 3/4 fewer deaths of severely ill patients than conventional treatments. Doctors who had went public in the early months to tell the effectiveness of Ivermectin were ridiculed and silenced. Some health care providers lost their licenses.
Ivermectin has been shown on the national platform that it works by football players who took the drug, got Covid, but had few to no symptoms. Why? Ivermectin cost ten cents a pill. An entire months course is $3.20 in cost. The expensive vaccine that is bankrupting the U.S. couldn't compete.
And yet, if I hope I can direct you to a section of my other post about Robert Malone, where I explain this more fully but:
1) I too was open to ivermectin (and other repurposed drugs) working.
2) The evidence was interesting at first but meta-analyses show it doesn’t work.
3) It’s true that Big Pharma is greedy and hawks all sorts of expensive useless drugs, but there’s no evidence anyone is failing to use a miracle drug for that reason. In fact, other cheap out-of-patent drugs, the corticosteroids, DO work to save lives, and ARE now routinely used on patients. If there is no effort to prevent the use of corticosteroids, then you have a very hard time persuading me that there’s just an effort to prevent the use of ivermectin. There’s no motive. If it really saved people, (instead of the early claims being shown to be put forward by people who literally faked their data) our doctors would be using it. Guaranteed. Any claim that ivermectin is a miracle drug being kept from patients has to explain why corticosteroids are not.
Be well!
"It’s also true that you have a much lower chance of being hospitalized and an even lower chance of being in the ICU if you’re vaccinated than if you’re not."
You cannot say this with the information provided. You would need a randomized clinical trial that equated both groups before looking at the hospital data. The actual clinical trials do not support this statement, and they were shut down and unblinded long before we could get close to saying something so emphatic with any degree of confidence. Frankly, they were so filled with relatively young and healthy participants, that even if they weren't cut short, I'm not sure how much we could say about the whole population, but I digress.
Your statement assumes a causality that we simply cannot claim. I'm not saying that we can claim the opposite. We don't have enough information. We don't know if the populations of vaccinated and unvaccinated hospital patients are comparable (in fact, we should assume they are not, since equating would take an enormous amount of effort and having this occur by chance is extremely unlikely). The from vs. with question could be poisoning these calculations in any number of ways.
I would also like to know who these patients are. Many patients are hospitalized because they are very old and frail and/or close to death. Of course, such patients were always more likely to be in the hospital than healthy 65 year-olds. Yet those healthy 65 year-olds are much more likely to be vaccinated than the close-to-death 90 year-olds, who are in turn much more likely to be in the hospital picking up a nosocomial COVID infection. I could go on, but I think the general point is clear. There is too much we do not know.
Sorry if this is just semantics. Perhaps you didn't intend to phrase your assertion in the way I am reading it.
You cannot, and will not, ever see a "clinical trial" on whether withholding an approved vaccine from someone results in a greater chance of hospitalization or death with omicron, because the data on the vaccine already exist, and it would be unethical to do that.
Show me one IRB. anywhere, that would approve such a "clinical trial," and then tell me how you'd run it.
The reason I can make this claim is that we have abundant observational data in its favor:
1. You look, all over the world, at who is hospitalized with covid.
2. You note which people are vaccinated and which are not.
3. You compare rates of hospitalization and death -- vaxxed versus unvaxxed.
4. You see a clear difference: ""vaccinated people are less likely to be hospitalized and die."
5. If you're a scientist and you think these data imply something _other_ than "the most likely explanation is the vaccine is protecting them," you can create your own reasonable, parsimonious, testable hypothesis about why "vaccinated people are less likely to be hospitalized and die." And then you can conduct your own research and tell us your results.
Do you have such a hypothesis?
My assertion was/is 'you cannot make the claim you've made without a clinical trial'. As I stated, I do not make the opposite claim (I have said this is unknowable). Not that your view is necessarily wrong, but that it is an opinion not a fact.
Incidentally, the original trials showed no benefit whatsoever in all-cause mortality in the vaccine arms. Perhaps they would have shown some if the participants had been a better representation of the at-risk population. There seems to be, at least for a short while, a small but measurable decrease in COVID illness, although some have argued that this is a result of design/definitions (many in the vaccination arm of study got sick but were not counted because they did not meet the definition of "vaccinated"; they got sick too soon after being injected).
I am not persuaded as you have been by your observations. All of this data is highly poisoned. We were recently told that 70% of COVID hospitalizations in one area of London had nothing to do with COVID whatsoever. We have also learned that some (many? most? all? we don't know) hospitals in the US categorize patients as unvaccinated if they cannot confirm their status conclusively. We do not know if this is 1% or 99% of patients; we are not told. In Alberta specifically, people have to proactively register their status and get a QR code to verify their record in the system. Do you know if hospitals use this to confirm status? What percentage of those 217 unvaccinated patients in Alberta are actually vaccinated but never downloaded their QR codes? I don't know, and the article offers no clues. Maybe this isn't the method of verification and is thus not relevant. More that I don't know.
There are 100 other questions I have that go begging in that article.
I appreciate your articles. I think you are biased like everyone though. I consider what you call "abundant observational data" to be more accurately described as 'a very select few tidbits that will make it easy for you to jump to the conclusion we want you to'.
And of course, I am biased as well, which is why I say, 'I don't know'. In the few cases where I have gotten a look at raw hospital data, I have found extraordinary amounts of massaging, all in one direction. The 70% figure from that one report out of London was not surprise whatsoever to me based on what I have seen firsthand. You might be shocked to learn the number of subclinical COVID+ patients that are in the maternity wards of our hospitals (a highly under-vaccinated sub-group if ever there were one). So, I am biased that we are not getting the full picture, and in an intentional way to manipulate us. I am very happy to be persuaded otherwise, but articles like this leave me with far more questions than answers.
What you said, I thought (and correct me if I'm wrong) is because we can't conduct impossible (because unethical) "clinical trials" we can't know that people who are vaccinated are less likely to be hospitalized and die than unvaccinated people.
And then you say other things that make quite literally no sense.
You say things like the data have been "highly poisoned" without explaining what you mean, and making vague unsupported claims that "we have been told" (by whom? where's the official data?).
You say thing like "hospitals in the US categorize patients as unvaccinated if they cannot confirm their status conclusively" -- and what? That must be a tiny number of people since everyone is entered into a state database and is either in the database or not. If I end up in a hospital unconscious and unable to speak, they'll be able to know my vaccination status by looking.
I can't speak to your unsourced claims about Alberta either since I don't live there. I spoke about the way the information in the article was misinterpreted, based on facts in the article.
Likewise, if there are "100 other questions" -- another unsupported claim -- perhaps you should elucidate them and publish them with supporting data.
I really can't engage with you if you simply deny what I'm saying and then fail to support your own point of view with actual data.
And then there is this from Alberta...
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1442487575717969921
and this...
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/alberta-medical-officer-apologizes-for-saying-cancer-stricken-14-yr-old-died-from-covid/
I cannot fathom anyone taking data from such a person at face value.
Nothing anyone writes here will make you think the "vaccine" is NOT safe, no matter how many people die because of it, so I'm not sure what's the point of even writing this article.
These therapies (not vaccines) are the deadliest in history, and one has to be obtuse to not see that in the data. What's even the point of arguing in bad faith?
That is simply not true.
So you can choose to engage and give me your best evidence, because I’m inviting you to share your piece of the elephant.
Or you can prove the point of the post, which is that many people are grasping so tightly to their piece of the elephant that they can’t tolerate adding new information to their understanding of a situation. And that’s a problem.
If you say these things are “deadliest in history” come at me with some data. If I’d have to be “obtuse” not to agree with you, then there’s no harm in you giving it a shot.