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).
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?
Jan 11, 2022·edited Jan 11, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
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.
Jan 11, 2022·edited Jan 12, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
(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.
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.
Jan 11, 2022·edited Jan 11, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
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.
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
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.
"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.
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?
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).
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?
Given the case of Maddie de Garay, all the “data” is very suspect.
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.
(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
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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?