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An excellent summary of an serious issue we are facing by commenter phwest:
Polio and smallpox are not the right comparison to Covid. Those are DNA viruses that are largely stable. The proper comparison to COVID is influenza, a similar RNA virus, which has had a vaccine (of sorts) out for decades of limited effectiveness that requires constant annual fiddling to have any impact at all. There are real medical arguments against the COVID vaccines, the most important of which runs as follows :
Vaccinations prime the body to respond to a highly mutating virus with a specific antibody response. Eventually the virus will mutate to a form that is close enough to the original that it provokes the vaccination response, but different enough that those antibodies will not be effective. Google “Original Antigenic Sin” for more details. Changing the vaccine won’t help, because it too will be close enough to the original to provoke the production of antibodies to the original vaccine, not the updated one.
Now this isn’t any different that natural immunity, which has the same issues. This can be seen with influenza. However natural immunity is generational in the population – that is, each generation acquires immunity to the strains of influenza that were prevalent in their youth, so that as influenza cycles through the various mutations that are available a certain portion of the population has acquired immunity to that strain. This provides a degree of herd immunity that limits the spread.
This is where the risks of a universal COVID vaccine become clear. We are immunizing the entire population against a single strain of COVID. Once the virus mutates its way past the vaccine, and it will, there will be no significant portion of the population that can even acquire natural immunity to the new strains, and new vaccines won’t work for the previously vaccinated. This in particular is why vaccinating children is such a disaster. Not only don’t they need it (children appear to clear the virus through a totally different immune response system in the body, and don’t generate antibodies at all), but now they have a primed immune response and it’s the wrong one.
This is essentially the argument against flu vaccines as well (the effectiveness seen in studies is not actually the effect of the vaccine at all, just the previously acquired immunity to the flu strain in question, which the studies do not control for). And the nastiest possibility is that the flu vaccines themselves are close enough to COVID that they are behind the sharp age response in serious outcomes, as these are the populations with the highest degree of vaccination for influenza (this would be an interesting study that will NEVER be funded for obvious reasons).
Now this is not my field by any stretch, so I am simply summarizing a number of presentations I’ve seen by several immunologists. This exposition makes sense to me, but I am not pretending that I am qualified to actually judge its veracity. It is obviously not a universally held position in that field (at least I hope not). But the public health drive for universal COVID vaccination has significant opposition in the medical community, including some prominent resignations in the US advisory committees over the decision to extend the vaccine to children.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
– Martin Luther King
Over the last two years, I’ve discovered a lot of ‘anti-statists’ I’d have once been certain I would count on when things got tough, turned out to be timid souls with feet of clay.
Student mocks insane adults:
“Thank you for teaching students that our own mental health is much less important than making triple vaccinated adults feel safe. […] Thank you for teaching us that we should never question authority or think critically.”
– Found on Twitter.
The vaccine doesn’t protect you from the virus, the vaccine protects you from the government.
– Roué le Jour
You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarised the discourse. You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease. You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice. A selection that lacks any epidemiological justification.
When you compare the destructive policies you are pursuing with the sane policies of some other countries – you can clearly see that the destruction you have caused has only added victims beyond the vulnerable to the virus. The economy you ruined, the unemployment you caused, and the children whose education you destroyed are the surplus victims as a result of your own actions only.
– Professor Ehud Qimron, Head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University (original text here)
The hold of mass psychosis on individuals in a crowd is not through logic or private incentives but through an emotional narrative. Therefore, it is through undermining that unifying narrative in the eyes of an individual that one loosens the bond between individual and group. It can be done through mockery or by persuading an individual to consume less (or no) mass-media messaging. The less propaganda is consumed, the easier one builds distinct communities and follows personal goals. The values of the crowd are often barbaric and contrary to those of individuals who join it; by encouraging the individual to return to acting as a moral agent, the individual will come to distinguish himself from the mass. However hackneyed and largely unexamined an individual’s personal ethics, they are at least different from those of the masses. Differentiation is done by making the individual aware of conflict between his/her morality and what the mass believes. It is possible to point out exceptions, especially relating to close relatives or friends or even inconsistencies in his/her own actions.
Here are some angles of persuasion that will help deprogramme the Covidian. Often, success rests on reminding people of their core values. Those mantras held up to March 2020 may have been unexamined and faulty but they were not worthless and their old shapes remain in the psyches of those currently under the sway of mass psychosis. Appeal to a person’s core values rather than presenting statistics, unless statistics are used to back up a moral argument.
– Alexander Adams, Deprogramming Covidian mass psychosis
If it wasn’t so serious, we could just laugh. But green activists have been so successful over the last 30 years with their “settled” science propaganda that they have persuaded a Conservative Government in the U.K. to embrace the Net Zero agenda. A Marxist-inspired, control and rule agenda complete with reduced mass personal transport, higher energy costs, restricted diets and all the loss of personal freedoms that these entail. The Covid pandemic has shown just how many freedoms can be snatched away in a modern connected society by the spread of widespread fear, fuelled by selective state-sponsored science and, of course, made up models.
[…]
Meanwhile back in the real world, it is obvious that many green extremists are starting to think the unthinkable. Democracy is all very well but is falling short when decisions have to be made by self-proclaimed experts going about their important work of saving the planet. Writing in the American Political Science Review last month, Ross Mittiga, Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Chile, noted that as the climate crisis deepens, “one can find a cautious but growing chorus of praise for ‘authoritarian environmentalism’”.
– Chris Morrison
Another reason for de-covidification otherwise the current totalitarianism will serve as a model for other ones.
Just how racist is The Guardian against black Africans? That they must be condemned to longer and deeper poverty to conform to fashionable metropolitan ideas?
– Tim Worstall
What started with the strange tale of the pandemic of an easy to beat aerosolized virus has become a global battle over the onward march to eliminate the control group. The bidding began with a clash of the propagandized fear porn-driven narrative. The stakes were upped substantially over hydroxychloroquine and anything else that might treat patients before reaching a progressed disease state. Now that controversy over vaccine harms has ramped up substantially, two sides find themselves committed.
Vicious tribalism is in vogue, and the stakes could not be higher. One side wants the other to submit to a “my government can inject me with anything it likes, at any time” policy. The other has filed genocide and war crimes complaints in at the International Criminal Court.
When the end states of the game involve either of,
1. Rounding up one side into concentration camps, or
2. Holding international or military tribunals to hold the leadership of the other side accountable for genocide,
it becomes harder and harder to imagine either side backing down.
– Mathew Crawford
I think that the people who operate Facebook and other social media are concerned about facts. That’s why they go out of their way to disappear them
– Shlomo Maistre
The vitriol hurled at the ‘unvaxed’ has been nothing short of evil over this pandemic; it makes you want to refuse it purely out of solidarity. Frankly, I would be loath to do anything requested of me by the type of low life that would refuse treatment to the unvaccinated or show such glee at their suffering.
I will repeat what I have said many times but only seems to get more prescient – this is the most inhumane and irrational response to disease since before the enlightenment.
Whoever kids themselves that this nonsense is enlightened simply because it comes with modern mRNA vaccines, track and trace technology and zoom calls should think again about what ‘enlightened’ really looks like.
This is tech enabled medievalism
– David Slade
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