Why? Plenty of young and healthy people died of COVID. Only some vaccines are mRNA types, and, in the USA anyway, all vaccines went through the same testing process as any other medication, they simply sped the process up by layering some of the steps - all that means is that rather than wait to see if one study passes before doing the next one (save money or whatever), they just overlapped them. Even for MRNA vaccines, that's 2 decade old tech.
> Plenty of young and healthy people died of COVID.
The median age of death due to COVID-19 in the UK[1], as of January 2021, was 83. I haven't checked but there is little reason to think this has changed much.
From page 9 of Public Health England's Excess Weight and COVID-19 report[2] of July 2020:
> patients with COVID-19 living with overweight (BMI ≥25kg/m2) or obesity (BMI ≥30kg/m2), compared with patients with a healthy weight (BMI 20 to <25kg/m2) are more likely to be hospitalised if infected with COVID-19
A report came out at the end of the year titled Associations of Physical Inactivity and COVID-19 Outcomes Among Subgroups[3]:
> The ORs are striking. In the full sample, those who were consistently inactive were 191% more likely to be hospitalized and 391% more likely to die than those who were consistently active. Dose‒response effects were mostly present across sex, race/ethnicity, age category, BMI category, and history of cardiovascular disease and
hypertension, although the CIs sometimes included one. Although the odds were highest for patients in the always inactive category, every lower category of physical inactivity increased the odds of adverse COVID-19 outcomes.
We now have reams of data and analysis that backs this up again and again and again - some of which was even known in the first 6 months of the pandemic (which makes a lot of the official advice, like lockdowns and denying access to parks and gyms, negligent and reckless in my view). To associate COVID-19 mortality with youth and health is perverse, unless it's to say "it's very rare".
Do you put on a seat belt when you're at a car dealer and try sitting in a car? You never know, a car might come through the window and hit the car you're in and you'll be glad you had that seat belt on.
Most people won't though, they see the risk for what it is, too low for them to worry about. It is, of course, up to you.
Your analogy doesn't make sense, mine does. You're ignoring the two other upsides of a covid vaccine, that being lower likelihood of contracting covid, and, lower likelihood of spreading covid if infected. These are valuable social side effects of getting vaccinated with a highly tested, demonstrably safe vaccine.
I’m using the most important measure - risk. Regardless of whether your claims are true or not, they are simply moot if the risk is low, and the risk is low, very low for young and healthy people.
Much like needing a seat belt in a stationary car parked in a building where no other cars move around.
Another reason your analogy fails is it makes sense to always put your seatbelt on when you get into a car, regardless of if your initial intention is, for whatever reason, to remain stationary in the parking garage: typically one gets into a car and immediately begins driving. It's a very good idea to 99% of the time have your seatbelt on when you're in a car. The habit of putting your seatbelt on when getting into a car, and only taking it off immediately before getting out of the car, is a very good one to have. Given that the downside of wearing your seatbelt is essentially nothing, the added "cost" of wearing your seatbelt the 1% of the time you're in your car and it's sitting in a parking garage is well worth it. Plus, you're eliminating the risk of driving off and forgetting to put your seatbelt on, after sitting comfortably with it off and immobile for however long.
I even put on my seat belt when I realise I've forgotten something in the car. I get in, put the seat belt on - for all the reasons you gave - and then I get my umbrella or phone or whatever it is (which can be a pain with the seat belt on, but I'm doing this for society so I make sure to take my responsibilities seriously) and then take off the seat belt and get out, safe in the knowledge that I dealt with all that minuscule risk in the best way possible.
Do I need to add /s or was that clear enough? The idea that I should put a seat belt on while looking at a car inside a car dealership just in case I forget to put on my seat belt when I'm going for a drive (keeping in mind that all modern cars have seat belt indicators) is such a reach that I'm aghast that you bothered me and anyone else who has the misfortune to read your comment with such low quality nonsense.
You believe in taking the vaccine under all circumstances, we get that, but to provide this kind of garbage - and it is garbage - to justify it, only makes your position seem weaker than it was before you wrote that. I'm am not a student and this is not the 4th floor common room for new undergrads.
What other medical interventions do you believe we should provide to people who are at close to zero risk from the maladies they protect against? Please peruse this list[1] and tell us all which we should or shouldn't get, or maybe we should get them all just in case. Perhaps tell everyone why they should get the Yellow Fever vaccine even though they are not at risk of contracting it usually. You never know, perhaps they'll bump into someone just back from an area with Yellow Fever and contract it and we'll have to call in Dr House and his team…
Many of those we do all get vaccinated against as children. It sounds like you're opposed to vaccines until they pass a magic "recently dead" threshhold? Apparently that threshhold is higher than 6.7 million, which is COVID's death count so far. So where's it at? Or perhaps you erroneously believe it's possible to live in a functional society where nobody has any responsibilities whatsoever to eachother and the maintenance of that society?
lol, should we stop vaccinating against polio (in that list you linked) cause nobody's died from it recently? I mean, the chance of dying from polio is 0, right?
You say this isn't an undergraduate dorm basement but you're using couch-in-the-garage arguments here. Honestly the CDC article for parents concerned about vaccinating their kids basically handles what you've said so far: https://www.unicef.org/parenting/health/parents-frequently-a...
> But these diseases are not present in my community. Do I still need to vaccinate my child?
> Yes. Although the diseases may be eliminated in your country or region, our increasingly interconnected world means that these diseases could spread from areas where they are still present.
> What is herd immunity?
> If enough people in your community are immunized against a certain disease, you can reach something called herd immunity. When this happens, diseases can’t spread easily from person to person because most people are immune. This provides a layer of protection against the disease even for those who cannot be vaccinated, such as infants.
> Herd immunity also prevents outbreaks by making it difficult for the disease to spread. The disease will become more and more rare, sometimes even disappearing entirely from the community.
Even if the risk of outright death to you is low, you have a responsibility to create a link in the herd immunity chain (even though covid vaccines don't provide true immunity), to help prevent those rare few who legitimately shouldn't get vaccinated, from getting infected. That's not even mentioning that COVID doesn't necessarily have to kill you to make you wish you'd got vaccinated: i know plenty who got infected pre-vaccines that suffer long term side effects in terms of their breathing ability, one of whom was a marathon runner. Tell me he wasn't healthy before?
Why do you reject this social responsibility, that has the upside of making a possible covid infection for you dramatically less likely to hospitalize you, let alone prevent long covid as well as simply make an infection less uncomfortable?
> Many of those we do all get vaccinated against as children.
It's not relevant as I did not ask about getting vaccines for things that are a risk or where the benefits outweigh the risks. Have you thought about arguing against the points I made? I know it's convenient to use a straw man but it's really not very interesting and it looks weak.
> It sounds like you're opposed to vaccines until they pass a magic "recently dead" threshhold?
I'm opposed to medical interventions where the benefits do not outweigh the risks. You know, like doctors and people like that. It's why they usually don't give out medicine like sweeties. <cough> opioid crisis <cough cough>.
> Apparently that threshhold is higher than 6.7 million, which is COVID's death count so far. So where's it at?
As I've pointed out (repeatedly), the vast, vast majority of those were with comorbidities such as age and/or health problems related to obesity. Those people, who we know are at high risk and for whom the benefits outweigh the risks should probably get vaccinated, if they wish to.
> Or perhaps you erroneously believe it's possible to live in a functional society where nobody has any responsibilities whatsoever to eachother and the maintenance of that society?
Thank you, Chairman Mao, for your insightful words. The nail that stands up truly should be knocked down! How many more straw men while I have to endure…?
> lol, should we stop vaccinating against polio (in that list you linked) cause nobody's died from it recently? I mean, the chance of dying from polio is 0, right?
…and there we have another straw man, apparently by a teenager, "lol". The benefits of the polio vaccine outweigh the risks. I can keep repeating this until you get it into your head. "lol".
> Even if the risk of outright death to you is low, you have a responsibility to create a link in the herd immunity chain
No, I don't, and there will be no herd immunity for COVID-19. This has been known for at least 18 months now (even the NYT will reported that[1], on a loooong time lag) and was the likely outcome long before that.
> That's not even mentioning that COVID doesn't necessarily have to kill you…
The risks of disease severity that correlate with known comorbidities hold for every stage of the disease, from hospital admission, to ICU admission, to use of respirator, to death. It's not that you get healthy people all the way to the ICU and then suddenly it's the fatties getting respirators and dying. Jesus wept. If you won't look at the data at least apply some common sense.
> i know plenty who got infected pre-vaccines that suffer long term side effects in terms of their breathing ability, one of whom was a marathon runner. Tell me he wasn't healthy before?
Anecdotes are not data, and such a small number of healthy people have encountered severe disease that, unless you believe in magic, he had a comorbidity that is yet to be understood or known - either in general or in his specific case (do you have his blood tests or know if he's one of the people that produce low amounts of interferon?) We do not live in the world of Harry Potter. Or, you know, you could just look at the literature:
> The marathon running population does not constitute solely persons with excellent cardiovascular health. Marathon runners, especially those with a family history of heart disease and other coronary risk factors, should not consider themselves immune to either sudden death or to coronary heart disease
> Why do you reject this social responsibility
Because it only exists in your head.
> that has the upside of making a possible covid infection for you dramatically less likely to hospitalize you
The effect of exercise was greater than any of the vaccines on all health events related to COVID-19. Read the paper Associations of Physical Inactivity and COVID-19 Outcomes Among Subgroups I shared above.
> let alone prevent long covid as well as simply make an infection less uncomfortable?
If you're talking about preventing COVID-19 then you should look up what sterilizing immunity[3] is, and note that none of the COVID-19 vaccines provide it.
As to comfort, when I had COVID-10 I found that painkillers helped a lot.
So, I asked a specific question that you ignored so I will make it more specific and explicit - please, tell us all why we should get the Yellow Fever vaccine even though most of us are not at risk of catching it and hence, the benefits cannot outweigh the risks. It'll be interesting watching you argue against medical orthodoxy.
> - please, tell us all why we should get the Yellow Fever vaccine even though most of us are not at risk of catching it
That's pointless, let's just go to the heart of the issue here. You, for some reason, are special, and smarter than all of us idiots that listened to our doctor when they said "get the covid vaccine."
So, when I answer your question as to why we don't get the Yellow Fever vaccine, "because doctors don't recommend it, but doctors do recommend getting the COVID vaccine," tell us why you are right, and why they are wrong to say we should get the COVID vaccine.
I can only think of two possibilities: the vast majority of doctors across the entire planet are stupider than you, or, they're all lying for... some reason. So, which is it?
In short, you're doing what you've accused me of doing: not really answering the question, *why NOT get the COVID vaccine?* Given that basically every health professional across the world recommends near everyone to get a COVID vaccine, including young and healthy people, what's your *good reason* not to? Because something vaguely about "opioid epidemic?" Not good enough, that's a unique-to-America problem, we don't have the same issue here with our health advice re: medication and vaccination.
Doctors recommend that young, healthy people get a COVID vaccine because the possibility of a side effect are extremely small, compared to the possibilities for the same person having a really bad COVID infection with long term effects. The possibilities of COVID vaccination side effects are also low enough to justify the social benefits of a vaccinated population. Though true herd immunity won't happen, every step each of takes to reduce the chance of infection, helps in the overall reduction of fatal or severe infections. It'd be great if it was black and white, but part of why covid is such a virulent pandemic is because that's not possible with this disease. It was the same with wearing masks: nope, wearing a mask doesn't completely eliminate the spread of covid, but the studies bear out that it reduces infection rate: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2119266119 (among others)
You said you don't think you'd get a severe covid infection, then claim I don't know my friend well enough to say why they would. You guessed at comorbidity, that could be detected through a blood panel, despite the greater medical field not being fully certain on exactly what comorbidity could cause a bad covid infection among a young health person, and whether said comorbidity could be detected in a blood panel.
You don't actually know for sure whether or not you're susceptible to a bad COVID infection, unless, again, you know something the rest of the world doesn't, which, you don't. So, the statistics indicate that you, like most people, should just get a COVID vaccine.
If the term "social responsibility" makes you hear the soviet national anthem in your head, I'm very curious how you feel about littering, playing loud music in public, and opting to hold in a pee until you get to a public bathroom. And if you think everyone that uses words like "lol" is a teenager, I'm really curious how you are at parties lmao
> That's pointless, let's just go to the heart of the issue here. You, for some reason, are special, and smarter than all of us idiots that listened to our doctor when they said "get the covid vaccine."
Thank you for providing a near perfect example of ad hominem. You avoid answering the straightforward question that is in no way "pointless" and instead attack me as a person. I'll take that as a telling win, as will anyone else reading this.
> So, when I answer your question as to why we don't get the Yellow Fever vaccine, "because doctors don't recommend it, but doctors do recommend getting the COVID vaccine," tell us why you are right, and why they are wrong to say we should get the COVID vaccine.
Thank you for providing a near perfect example of the appeal to authority fallacy. Firstly, not all doctors nor medical professionals, epidemiologists etc do recommend getting the vaccine for all individuals.
> tell us why you are right
Secondly, I have.
> You don't actually know for sure whether or not you're susceptible to a bad COVID infection, unless, again, you know something the rest of the world doesn't, which, you don't. So, the statistics indicate that you, like most people, should just get a COVID vaccine.
This is faulty reasoning. The fact is that statistically I am unlikely to be the kind of person with a comorbidity, apparent or not, known or not. Hence, the risk as can be assessed is small. Unknowns unknowns, to quote Donald Rumsfeld for a moment, are not a useful part of a risk assessment. I guess we'll find you hiding in your home made nuclear bunker waiting for the alien invasion? No, didn't think so.
> If the term "social responsibility" makes you hear the soviet national anthem in your head, I'm very curious how you feel about littering, playing loud music in public, and opting to hold in a pee until you get to a public bathroom.
None of those examples involve a medical procedure, an invasive one at that. A better example would be the forced abortions and impregnations that the three best known types of nasty socialists, the Soviets, the Maoists and the Nazis, imposed on some people. They would call that "social responsibility" too.
> And if you think everyone that uses words like "lol" is a teenager, I'm really curious how you are at parties lmao
People who would say "lol" at a party are people I'd like to avoid so it's not a concern of mine. People who are unable to handle their cognitive dissonance in the face of information that counters their ill informed, ill thought out notions, who let emotion go to their head and respond irrationally, they certainly do resemble teenagers in many ways.
> Thank you for providing a near perfect example of the appeal to authority fallacy.
Appeal to authority is only a rhetorically valid challenge if the authority is wrong. It's not. And there's not one single authority I'm appealing to here: it's all the people on earth most qualified to say whether or not people should get vaccinations. If "appeal to authority" means "you can't ever ask qualified people what to do in a situation they're qualified to discuss, that's appeal to authority!" then I really don't know how you can have any sort of rational basis for existence at all. You can't trust your doctor, you can't trust your car mechanic, you can't trust a camera review website, you can't trust a chef to make you good food, I mean, what on earth kind of intellectual basis for existence is that? Absurdity.
> Firstly, not all doctors nor medical professionals, epidemiologists etc do recommend getting the vaccine for all individuals.
Almost all do for almost all people. I never tried to argue that everyone should get a covid vaccine, just that those who doctors recommend should, should. Very simple. The cases where someone shouldn't are rare and well documented. Your argument that the young and healthy shouldn't doesn't apply here. It's moot to bring it up at all, and it's bad rhetoric.
> This is faulty reasoning. The fact is that statistically I am unlikely to be the kind of person with a comorbidity, apparent or not, known or not. Hence, the risk as can be assessed is small. Unknowns unknowns, to quote Donald Rumsfeld for a moment, are not a useful part of a risk assessment. I guess we'll find you hiding in your home made nuclear bunker waiting for the alien invasion? No, didn't think so.
The chance of you having a negative side effect from a covid vaccine that's worse than a bad covid infection, is lower than the chance of you having a really bad covid infection. So, why don't you get the vaccine? Why do you decide that you're more worried about a side effect from a covid vaccine, than you are about a bad covid infection? The statistics don't hold for your reasoning, it's you engaging in faulty reasoning. This on top of the social benefit upsides of slowing the spread of COVID, reducing hospitalization, etc.
> A better example would be the forced abortions and impregnations that the three best known types of nasty socialists, the Soviets, the Maoists and the Nazis,
As far as I know nobody's forcing anybody to get covid vaccinations. I'm arguing that you should do so, not be forced to. My argument is more medically and ethically sound, that's all. So if you're a rational person with good ethics, you should get vaccinated. That should be enough, there's no reason to involve State violence to enforce it. Also, since when are the nazis socialists lmao. Wait... because the German translates to "national socialism?" I've never actually encountered someone that took the nazis at such face value lol. Do you also believe the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea is a democratic republic? In any point it doesn't really matter to me what the nazis called social responsibility, their idea of society is ethically horrifying, so we need not consider their opinions on the concept of social responsibility.
> People who would say "lol" at a party are people I'd like to avoid so it's not a concern of mine.
That's a self report for being boring at parties fam
> People who are unable to handle their cognitive dissonance in the face of information that counters their ill informed, ill thought out notions, who let emotion go to their head and respond irrationally, they certainly do resemble teenagers in many ways.
Yet you're the one that believes, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that they shouldn't get a covid vaccine.
My earlier accusation that you must be smarter isn't an ad hominem - your claim is extraordinary and thus requires extraordinary evidence, and also requires a better explanation. Heliocentric theory isn't just bad because the evidence doesn't back it, it also requires a whole stack of bad explanations to justify it, inventing magic beings to carry around globes of light to explain what we observe in the sky. Your idea, that almost all doctors on earth are telling almost all people on earth to get a COVID vaccine are either wrong or lying, requires an extraordinary explanation. Either a massive failure in the scientific process in thousands of research centers across the globe - including in countries that are actively engaged in propaganda wars with eachother and normally very motivated to counter eachother!. Or, conspiracy, which, you know, if you want to be on the side of the flat earthers, please by all means, but at least be aware of the hilarious irony of doing so and then turning around and accusing those of us that got vaccinated as engaging in "cognitive dissonance."
You haven't provided a good argument to not get vaccinated. You dropped a lot of links around, but none of them counter the core argument: most people, as recommended by their doctors, should get a COVID vaccine.
> as will anyone else reading this.
lol, nobody is reading this, days old and deeply buried thread. Just me and you here.
> Appeal to authority is only a rhetorically valid challenge if the authority is wrong.…
That whole paragraph is erroneous from the start.
The truth or falsity of a statement that appeals to authority is not what make it fallacious - nor would it for any logical fallacy. As the name hints at, it is the logic which is in question, the reasoning, the form, not the truth. "2 + 2 = 4 because n + 2 = 4" is fallacious yet the statement "2 + 2 = 4" is correct. Appeal to authority is a fallacy of relevance - like ad hominem - because it does not address the reasoning. 2 + 2 = 4 isn't true because my maths teacher says it's true, and to say it is because my maths teacher is a maths teacher or has a degree in maths is irrelevant to why 2 + 2 = 4 is correct (or not).
Schoolboy error.
> And there's not one single authority I'm appealing to here: it's all the people on earth most qualified to say whether or not people should get vaccinations.
Except for notable exceptions:
“No. Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.” - Martin Kulldorff, until recently he was professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. I'll let Wikipedia continue:
> He is a member of the US Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Or we can look at his fellow signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration, Sunetra Gupta:
“What we’ve seen is that in normal, healthy people, who are not elderly or frail or don’t have comorbidities, this virus is not something to worry about no more than how we worry about flu,”
“most of us don’t need to worry about coronavirus,”
and unquoted but attributed[1]: “Gupta said that she thinks the coronavirus pandemic will end naturally and will become part of our lives just like influenza.”
Sunetra Gupta is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.
So you're stuck with your appeal to authority, and you've multiplied it with argumentum ad populum.
> Your argument that the young and healthy shouldn't doesn't apply here. It's moot to bring it up at all, and it's bad rhetoric.
I don't think you understand what moot means, and as for bad rhetoric, "lol".
Case in point:
> The chance of you having a negative side effect from a covid vaccine that's worse than a bad covid infection, is lower than the chance of you having a really bad covid infection.
Now that's moot.
> So, why don't you get the vaccine?
Because I'm not at risk. (See, it was moot)
> This on top of the social benefit upsides of slowing the spread of COVID, reducing hospitalization, etc.
a) Thanks again, Mao
b) Isolating when symptomatic slows the spread more effectively
c) It reduces hospitalisation for those at risk
> As far as I know nobody's forcing anybody to get covid vaccinations.
Let's look at the first result I got for "Biden vaccine mandate" from NBC News[2] to see your wilful ignorance:
*Biden announces sweeping vaccine mandates affecting millions of workers*
> My argument is more medically and ethically sound, that's all.
On that[3]:
> The measles vaccine provided sterilizing immunity in most people.
> That's not the case with these vaccines.
> How can mandates be moral in this case? With a non-sterilizing product, it's nobody's business except mine if I want to get vacced or not.
>
> Sunetra Gupta @SunetraGupta
> Jan 28, 2022
> Replying to @neorevolt
> Exactly
Well well. Not so moral, in the eyes of a world renowned expert in vaccines.
Your argument is based on false premises and a lack of basic knowledge. It is littered with errors of reasoning and fact which makes it in no way ethically sound. Much like moot and fallacy, I doubt you know what sound means in the context of argument.
> Also, since when are the nazis socialists lmao. Wait... because the German translates to "national socialism?"
Yes, I based it entirely on the name.I wouldn't, for instance, have bothered to know basic facts about the most important event of the 20th century before coming to that conclusion, just the name. Why didn't they call themselves international socialists? I wonder. Why are they against individual liberty? I can't fathom. Why does the 25 point plan read like a socialist manifesto. Who knows?
Jesus wept.
> My earlier accusation that you must be smarter isn't an ad hominem - your claim is extraordinary
It's ordinary, medical orthodoxy, which is why mandates and pushing for not at risk populations to vaccinate is contentious.
> Your idea, that almost all doctors on earth are telling almost all people on earth to get a COVID vaccine are either wrong or lying, requires an extraordinary explanation.
I haven't ever claimed such a thing, while you are making a claim on behalf of "all doctors on earth" that they haven't made either. The more correct claim is that doctors in top government positions are telling people to get a COVID vaccine. Others contradict them (I can give you a long list).
> Either a massive failure in the scientific process in thousands of research centers across the globe
From [4]:
> Randomized trials show all-cause mortality reduction from the AZ/J&J/S adenovirus-vector vaccines (RR=0.37, 95%CI:0.19-0.70) but not from the Pfizer/Moderna mRNA vaccines (RR=1.03, 95%CI 0.63-1.71). By Dr. @StabellBenn et al.
And from Stabell-Benn's interview with Unherd[5]:
> It is also a bit of a Pandora’s box, I think, for health authorities, because if they start acknowledging these effects there is also the huge problem of potential negative non-specific effects that have actually been brought to the attention of the WHO already 20 years ago, but they haven’t really responded with the investigations. So you can see the potential backlash for the WHO, for vaccination programmes, if it actually comes out that some vaccines have carried these negative non-specific effects.
> So I’ve been in this business for many years and I know that there are powers out there who aren’t interested in really digging into these findings. And again, it also has implications for the way we test vaccines, so you can see it is complicated stuff also for companies, for regulators, if we need to design vaccine phase 3 trials which do not only study the specific disease but also study all-cause mortality and morbidity.
If the mRNA vaccines aren't as effective then the risk/benefit ratio changes, so I should take something like the AZ vaccine, but that was withdrawn in several countries as the risks outweighed the benefits, but I should still get the vaccine, right?
You might also note this[6], in the BMJ, November 2021:
> A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company [Pfizer] falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding. After repeatedly notifying Ventavia of these problems, the regional director, Brook Jackson (video 1), emailed a complaint to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ventavia fired her later the same day. Jackson has provided The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails.
That's a massive failure - and possible conspiracy - in some research centers across the globe. Isn't funny how that company's claims of vaccine efficacy and safety are now being questioned? What's really funny (not haha) is how they weren't questioned more before, but we have the Twitter Files to answer that conundrum.
> if you want to be on the side of the flat earthers,
Kulldorf, Gupta and Stabell-Benn are flat earthers? Interesting.
> please by all means, but at least be aware of the hilarious irony of doing so and then turning around and accusing those of us that got vaccinated as engaging in "cognitive dissonance."
And there we have your go-to, a straw man. I have written repeatedly that it is up to people to decide whether they get the vaccine, and that they should base it on their situation i.e. risk/benefit and good conscience. I've not accused anyone of cognitive dissonance for getting vaccinated. I have, however, observed cognitive dissonance in you, and we're about to see some more:
> You haven't provided a good argument to not get vaccinated.
Uh huh.
> You dropped a lot of links around,
Right.
> but none of them counter the core argument
Didn't read them, I see. Finally:
> > as will anyone else reading this.
> lol, nobody is reading this, days old and deeply buried thread. Just me and you here.
I often read entire threads on HN. Perhaps this isn't the place for you, it requires a higher standard of thought, which itself requires concentration.
> 2 + 2 = 4 isn't true because my maths teacher says it's true, and to say it is because my maths teacher is a maths teacher or has a degree in maths is irrelevant to why 2 + 2 = 4 is correct (or not).
...right, but the math teacher is less likely to teach you bad math, than, say, an antivaxxer on hackernews. And the great thing is, the greater medical authority is, as I said, not one person, but tens of thousands of people among thousands of institutions in hundreds of countries. I'm not "appealing to authority," I'm appealing to basic reasoning at this point.
> US Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You immediately begin appealing to authority, lol.
> Thanks again, Mao
If you genuinely believe doing things for the betterment of the world is communism, your ethical system, and understanding of history, is bonkers. But, we already knew that, because you continue to claim the nazis were socialists. No, they were not.
> Isolating when symptomatic slows the spread more effectively
...except you can be asymptomatic infectious.
> It reduces hospitalisation for those at risk
Which, again, roll the dice on that. If you believe you are at higher chance of bad vaccine side effect than bad covid infection, you're simply wrong.
> Biden announces sweeping vaccine mandates affecting millions of workers
I fail to see any similarity between this and nazis sterilizing jews at gunpoint. Wait a second... are you saying that under capitalism, all labor is extracted through force of violence, because one will be homeless and starve if one doesn't work, and thus anything that affects one's ability to do employment is the same as sentencing them to homelessness and starvation, and in the usa, no healthcare? Woah that's weird, I hear the soviet national anthem.
You're talking about this gupta person again, let's see how much better they are at virology than the entire world of experts they're disagreeing with. Ah, in May of 2020, they said
> "the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in [the UK]. So, I think [the infection fatality rate] would be definitely less than one in a thousand, and probably closer to one in ten thousand."
Weird, turns out it's actually about 2.3 in a thousand, or as high as 6.6 in a thousand. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana... so they were either double off in their expert estimate... or far, far more off base. As for "it's on the way out," in May of 2020, hahaha, yeah, some fantastic, smarter-than-everyone-else expert you've got there.
Your champion of the antivax cause is not a very popular person, which isn't itself an indictment if they had good science, but... they don't. Their science has been off every single time. Could it be that the greater scientific community disagrees with Gupta because... Gupta is wrong?
> but we have the Twitter Files to answer that conundrum.
oh ffs, if you want to see hunter biden's dick you can just google it
> Kulldorf, Gupta and Stabell-Benn are flat earthers? Interesting.
No but they all have these super weird ties to the American Institute for Economic Research, libertarian think tank famous denying climate change as a major risk, or this whizz bang of an article justifying sweat shop labor https://doi.org/10.1007/s12122-006-1006-z fun group of folks! But definitely these guys are more trustworthy than the greater scientific community that basically roundly disagrees with them.
Their brainchild, that Barrington Declaration, is weird to bring up, arguing for "protecting vulnerable groups" against infection, while the signatories get on TV and argue against any sort of mandate doing just that. No wonder they were accused of being politically motivated, they're constantly contradicting themselves. They also just say wrong things - Remember when Kulldorff argued that influenza was deadlier than COVID, despite it only killing one kid that year? Against COVID's 1k?
You basically are just restating the various viewpoints of Barrington signatories, but those have all been probed to destruction. Big fan of herd immunity? So was Sweden. The only upside is now we can at least point at them and say "well, it was said this strategy wouldn't work, and as we can see, it didn't." Here, you like wikipedia, they collated all the oppositions to Barrington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration#C...
But this is a lot of words for what I think is really happening here: You're some form of conservative (maybe in your country you call it "libertarianism"), conservatives identify alongside covid denialism, so you do too. Your weird ideas about nazi political ideology and minimizing of their destructive actions by comparing it to, lol, vaccine mandates, illustrates this further. It never mattered what the science said, Your People said COVID is fake so you do too.
> Perhaps this isn't the place for you, it requires a higher standard of thought, which itself requires concentration.
> I'm not "appealing to authority," I'm appealing to basic reasoning at this point.
No, what you wrote in that paragraph is a further appeal to authority. It's what the cool kids call doubling down.
> You immediately begin appealing to authority, lol.
I'll explain what an appeal to authority is again for those who think they're too cool for school.
Most informal logical fallacies, when made, are fallacies of relevance as they do not address the logic of a statement or line of reasoning (else, necessarily, they are a failing of the logic, but mostly people make fallacies of relevance). As you pointed out, a maths teacher is less likely to teach bad mathematics but that isn't a valid or sound defence of any particular mathematical statement that a maths teacher makes. In order to defend a particular statement a mathematician has to do what maths teachers tell their students to do, show the working.
To state someone's expertise in an area is not a fallacy of relevance unless it sits in place of reasoning, otherwise it only provides context. If the reasoning is supplied then look at the reasoning.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[1]:
> 9. The ad verecundiam fallacy concerns appeals to authority or expertise. Fundamentally, the fallacy involves accepting as evidence for a proposition the pronouncement of someone who is taken to be an authority but is not really an authority. This can happen when non-experts parade as experts in fields in which they have no special competence—when, for example, celebrities endorse commercial products or social movements. Similarly, when there is controversy, and authorities are divided, it is an error to base one’s view on the authority of just some of them.
So, look at the information, weigh it up, and come to what you think is right. Try to avoid making glaringly obvious mistakes along the way, like the ones you have repeatedly made.
> Big fan of herd immunity? So was Sweden. The only upside is now we can at least point at them and say "well, it was said this strategy wouldn't work, and as we can see, it didn't."
Firstly, who isn't a fan of herd immunity? Do you even understand what it is?
Lastly, because what else needs to be said about Sweden after this, the data[2] shows that Sweden did not make a horrible mistake with their approach.
I can skip the rest, sifting out substantive argument from the conspiracy theories and ad hominem from that is surely a waste of time, but this caught my eye and gave me a good chuckle:
> But this is a lot of words for what I think is really happening here: You're some form of conservative (maybe in your country you call it "libertarianism"), conservatives identify alongside covid denialism, so you do too. Your weird ideas about nazi political ideology and minimizing of their destructive actions by comparing it to, lol, vaccine mandates, illustrates this further. It never mattered what the science said, Your People said COVID is fake so you do too.
Cognitive dissonance often requires that you create some evil character, an other, for those you disagree with. (ironically, something Soviets, Mao, and Nazis did). Suffering from it certainly hasn't helped with the accuracy of those guesses, I'd suggest you give it up as soon as possible.
Do try though to pick up a history book in future, at the very least.
>all vaccines went through the same testing process as any other medication, they simply sped the process up by layering some of the steps - all that means is that rather than wait to see if one study passes before doing the next one (save money or whatever), they just overlapped them
This is misinformation. The normal process involves at least 4-5 years of observation to identify long-term side effects; you can't speed this up, as no matter how many people you test, it's not going to make long-term side effects manifest sooner. And while the technology has been around for 20 years, it certainly hasn't been trialed on humans until very recently, due to difficulty finding a safe delivery mechanism.
> The normal process involves at least 4-5 years of observation to identify long-term side effects.
If you have for instance an Ebola vaccine, how can you show it works when there's only a few hundred cases a year? You can't just infect people. You have to vaccinate a bunch of test candidates and wait. Sometimes years until you can show a statistical advantage.
With COVID literally everyone had it so they could show it worked by the end of the weekend.
> ... it's not going to make long-term side effects manifest sooner.
They're looking for short-term side effects, they're testing efficacy and they're looking for 'long-term side-effects.' A long-term side-effect here doesn't mean one that's latent for years before presenting, it's one that presents quickly (days, weeks) but causes lasting harm. So yeah they're looking for them but they're not primarily vaccinating people and then following them for 4-5 years to see if something miraculously goes wrong 3 years later. That's what VAERS is for.
> And while the technology has been around for 20 years, it certainly hasn't been trialed on humans until very recently, due to difficulty finding a safe delivery mechanism.
mRNA vaccines and adenoviral vector vaccines have been in development since the 1970s. Vaccines have been around since 1721. We know what kinds of effects to expect, and they're (a) overwhelmingly short term and (b) we know of no mechanism where latent effects might randomly appear 4-5 years later since we know these platforms don't alter DNA.
We know from having extensively characterized the platform over fifty years that if nothing happens within the first few months, nothing's going to happen.
So really the parent post is right. Development went fast because we (a) leveraged a platform we'd extensively characterized and knew a ton about (b) were able to show efficacy very quickly due to prevalence of the disease within the population (c) layered a bunch of steps.
[edit] They didn't exactly YOLO this and I think that's born out by the fact we have like 5 different vaccines developed over comparable timeframes, administered billions of times all with the absolute bare minimum of adverse effects and incredible efficacy. Frankly it beggars belief that lightning struck so many times and we just got lucky a few billion times over. Maybe we were careful, and maybe the system worked.
That's biology. It's not like we're dealing with robots with little timers in them here. They'd be "long term" side effects simply because they're so rare it'd take years to observe one. So, if you carefully watch a very large population, you'd find them sooner.
What about something like cancer? If you get diagnosed with some form of cancer tomorrow, it's probably not because some cell first mutated yesterday, right?
That would essentially be a "robot with a little timer". And it's just the only one a layman like myself can come up with off the cuff. I have to assume there are more.
Edit: I watched the video, and this guy is presumably much smarter than I am, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem very convincing.
He's basically just claiming what you said, that conditions that take an extended amount of time to manifest just dont exist. That in some portion of the population, those conditions will necessarily manifest quickly. The video doesnt explain why I should believe that other than saying something like "these things are possible, but very unlikely".
IDK if dude is smarter than you are, but he's a domain expert. He knows enough about the subject that it would likely take you something in the range of a decade of dedicated time, research, engagement, and experience to reach an equivalence. You're probably quite capable of this, if you decide to go down this path.
If you don't want to go down this path, though, know that it probably will just take that breadth of experience to develop the understanding and intuition necessary to be able to say and explain things on the subject with confidence.
You should believe it because you trust people like the one in the video when they tell you it's a good idea to clean your wounds to prevent infection. You vaguely understand this has something to do with germs, but you (probably) don't know all about the various actual diseases that cause open wound infections, their outcomes, their treatments, the history of research behind it, etc. It's an entire field of medicine, actually. Luckily for you, a lot of the important stuff can be condensed into a single important general-action for the populations: clean your wound with soap and water, then, cover it with a bandage.
So why do you trust domain experts when they tell you about first aid, and not what they tell you about hugely more complex subjects, such as vaccinations and drug trials?
Why the sudden skepticism now? During a pandemic, of all times? If this was a movie, the climax / resolution would be the development of a vaccine - thank god, the experts delivered us from this terror. What were you expecting instead? 10 years of lockdown while we wait for things to shake out?
NNT is certainly smart and is an expert, but what domain? Last time I checked it was mathematical risk modelling and options trading, not medical research. And the most robust modelling on a flawed premise is still flawed.
As sibling says, I vaguely know of the guy in the video as a math expert, not as some expert in a particularly relevant field of medicine.
But even so, I was expecting to watch the video and have it explain why I should believe x, and instead I found it just reiterating that I should believe x.
This is a little off topic for the thread (I was originally just responding to the claim that "Vaccines don’t have long term side effects"), but based on what you said:
Would you feel the same way about "you should clean your wounds to prevent infection" as you would with "you should inject this compound that we invented 1 (or 2 or 3) years ago?
Disclaimer: I think on the net it was sensible for young healthy people to take even Moderna as COVID can cause serious long term damage, but it wasn't costless and we aren't completely sure that it was a net benefit to the healthy young for them to vaccinate (this is ignoring the large effects from things like them infecting others or taking up healthcare resources).
Not worried about flu vaccines because they’ve been around forever. MRNA vaccines are relatively new and weren’t observed for long term side effects like other vaccines.
Johns Hopkins to me is part of the same machine making anyone who doesn’t get a vaccine an outcast. I would trust them about as much as the CCP regarding COVID’s origins.
