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Relevant meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2002287-wikihow

A list of claims that are likely to see some kind of quiet semi-official recognition over the next five years:

1. COVID vaccines can injure and kill people.

2. They do so at a much higher rate than other vaccines have done in the past.

3. They can hurt fertility (see the recent crash in birth rates around the world).

4. For the vast majority they were not a good cost/benefit tradeoff.

5. Lockdowns were a failed policy and failed in the way lockdown opponents said they'd be at the start.

Some of these things are actually already being admitted in some quarters, if you look closely. Bill Gates, Mr Vaccine himself, recently admitted that COVID is a disease that "a disease mainly of the elderly, kind of like flu". Remember how people who said COVID is basically a bad flu were treated in 2020? How people who said the vaccines don't make sense for anyone except the elderly in 2021?

And w.r.t. injuries you're seeing the Nordic countries pull the vaccines for young people because the cost/benefit tradeoff is wrong. Moderna specifically got banned in parts of Europe for I think the under 30s, though if you look at the data used to justify that it should really have been for more like the under 50s and that data is certainly way too optimistic anyway due to under-reporting.

So far it's still dead silence on fertility. But birth rates are public. Anyone can draw graphs of them, align them seasonally and see the massive drop that starts 9 months after the vaccine rollout reached women of childbearing age.

Reality is most of the things labelled as conspiracy theories never were. They were people saying wait, these decisions make no rational sense, this is clearly mass hysteria and needs to be opposed. No conspiracy was invoked by the vast majority of the most vocal opponents I follow - just irrationality and institutional, culturally embedded ethical problems in the public health sector.

You are clearly oversimplifying the relation between fertility and vaccines. You have no data to back up causation rather than correlation.

It is the same flawed argument used by people who think vaccines cause autism. "Oh my kid presented with autism when he was checked and was recently vaccinated, clearly it must be the cause!".

No, there's actually plenty of data. Huge numbers of women have reported disrupted periods immediately after taking the vaccines. They were all ignored, of course because of dumb "correlation is not causation" arguments like yours.

Correlation does not imply causation but causation always implies correlation, so when something fundamentally changes in a biological process as basic as reproduction and the only change of similar scale that matches temporally is an experimental new medical technology, you have to be willfully blind to not want an immediate, thorough and unconflicted investigation into that, because if it isn't the vaccines then that is one hell of a coincidence.

We aren't going to get such an investigation of course, because the public health community doesn't want to admit the possibility that their policies have negative side effects. So correlations will be the best we'll get.

“ public health community doesn't want to admit the possibility that their policies have negative side effects”

Any phd student could do the research and publish it. And if they are right the research paper will become famous.

I think you just anthropomorphism big organizations and give them feeling and motivation. This is something conspirationnist like to do because it give the impression that a big group of people aware of the “secret” are knowingly against them

> Any phd student could do the research and publish it. And if they are right the research paper will become famous.

Absolutely wrong. If a medical student publishes such a paper, the following will happen:

1. Lancet & co. will reject publication. Peer review will be rejected because no one can be found to mess with the pharma industry.

2. student decides to upload it to an open access server. A link is posted to various interest groups.

3. FB, YT and Google will add a warning to each posting with this link that it's contradicts current CDC findings.

4. a fact checker will quickly write an article pointing out that experienced medical professionals do not see any correlation and the student should rather continue studying

5. the university will distance itself from the paper

6. Anthony Fauci & Christian Drosten will publish a joint statement calling the data insufficient and the analysis flawed. Then they will point out something about correlation and causality and simply deny a connection between birth rate and vaccinations

7. the medical student's career is over before it has even begun

P.S.: this has happened already several times. But fair enough - not everytime Fauci & Drosten had to intervene to keep people silenced.

so basically, your theory is that "Lancet & co" is magically under the control of the illuminati and that all science is broken :)

Straw man argument.

Of course, you can deny that the phama industry in particular has a massive influence on publications like the Lancet. After all, such publications are essential for the approval of a drug. And with multi-billion dollar projects, managers will naturally refuse to have any influence on these publications. After all, it's all about science, and the pharmaceutical industry works exclusively for the benefit of mankind. That corresponding agencies exist, which flood the community with secondary papers to make a publication appear "credible" is of course just a nasty fairy tale.

The fact that scientists defame each other as conspiracy theorists - as happened with the lab-leak theory - is of course also only in the best interests of science.

But of course you are right - in science everyone works completely selflessly and honorably hand in hand for the exclusive good of mankind.

academic publication are not necessarily at all for the approval of a drug. All they need is to do a safety study following the GLP methods to make the FDA happy.

There's no Illuminati, just incentives. Why would scientists and people who depend on science being respected publish papers showing that science created problems instead of solved them? Every incentive they have is the opposite.

The incentive for researcher working for an university is simply to publish as many paper as possible and get as many citations as possible on those papers.

They don’t care if “science“ solve a problem or not they get paid either way.

And guess what, if you publish papers showing that your colleagues and funding sources have no clue and may actually be hurting people, you won't get paid in future.

If you want to call many separate systems with differing interests, ideologies and goals ‘the Illuminati’, go ahead. Nice strawman. The comment clearly name different parties.

You just can’t attribute a behavior that require coordination by a group of people. It’s common for 2 people to make a deal to execute an illegal scheme ex: 2 CEO of 2 different company. But it.s impossible for all employee to knowingly participate in the illegal scheme and no whistleblower leaking the whole operation.

This is a really common but really naive take. People who have actually tried to publish papers that make vaccines look bad, don't get famous or praised. Their work is sunk immediately because it never gets published at all.

This has led to the strange phenomenon in which all vaccine papers praise vaccines and say everyone should take them in the abstract, even if the data the paper reports shows clearly that there is a big problem. You just can't get published without a statement of ideological loyalty at the start.

Vaccines are a modern miracle of science. They save lives effectively. Yes, we have a system that is so privatized and powerful and feeding off public spending getting ridiculously rich and the formalization of scientific literature sounds like a huge PITA and a privileged one at that—-it’s fucked up. But, vaccines work when you need them to, wouldn’t you say? Presuming you had a choice, it’s a reliable technology and we’re on a technology forum.. so, come on, no boogeymen talk here, please.

people who said COVID is basically a bad flu are still wrong because Covid kill a lot more people than the flue. because covid unlike the flue will kill people that are other perfectly healthy

> because covid unlike the flue will kill people that are other perfectly healthy

Not true. Every flu season there are stories of young people in great shape– often athletes or in the military, who die due to the flu.

right but if you go to the ER it’s not full of young people with the flue.

But I still remember Italy ER having lot of young people on ventilator!

Lot of obese peoples or skinny fat people (skinny but with obese metabolism) all about muscle/fat ratio.

It’s not because you look good on instagram that you are healthy…

Time to fight superstitions

Re your first point. This was always true. The cdc has always had a page listing incidents from vaccines. They’re just EXCEEDINGLY rare, much rarer than bad health outcomes from covid. If your point #2 was true at ALL there would have to have been millions hospitalized from the vaccine… and we all know that’s not true.

Covid has BECOME a disease that primarily effects the elderly and immunocompromised. That was due to the huge vaccination efforts, and mutations in the disease.

Either way, I’m still wearing a mask when I go grocery shopping because I don’t want to be the one who gives covid to someone’s grandma, or someone doing chemotherapy.

> Covid has BECOME a disease that primarily effects the elderly and immunocompromised.

Could you point to a reference on this? My understanding was COVID had always primarily affected the elderly and immunocompromised.

Depends on how you interpret "primarily affected". Like, yeah, it always had an outsized impact on the elderly and immunocompromised - but the vaccine and changes in the virus have lead to a pretty decent decrease in risk for younger people.

And no I'm not going to go do your reading for you. Vaccine effectiveness stats are easily googled. Reports on omicron's reduced severity are also easily googled.

Depends on how you define "primarily". Elderly and immunocompromised have always been at a much higher risk, but there were still thousands of young, healthy people who died in the pre-vaccine days.

This isn’t true.

It, in fact, is true.

May be your definition of “healthy” might be reviewed. Most <40yo dying were morbid obese. Not healthy.

No professional or statistician would describe someone who is “morbidly obese” as not having underlying conditions

Thousands globally? Maybe. If you look at places that didn't overreact like Sweden then there's no excess death under 75, so young people weren't dying regardless of health. In other parts of Europe there was no excess death under 45 but many countries over-reacted especially at the start with ventilator abuse, so that would have hurt the numbers.

The day peoples will understand that BMI > 30 induces immnunodepression.

Obese peoples have 5 to 6 times more chance to die from any respiratory disease than normal peoples. Also affecting effectiveness of any vaccine by halving it for obese peoples.

Covid-19 was primarily fat shaming, and also naturally targeting old peoples cause they are often weak at advanced age.

"If your point #2 was true at ALL there would have to have been millions hospitalized from the vaccine… and we all know that’s not true."

We actually have no idea how many people have become sick because of the vaccine because the medical system refuses to record vaccine injuries properly.

But, consider the US reporting system. Most reports come from medical providers not individuals. There are in fact about 175,000 COVID vaccine hospitalizations reported and the underreporting factor for VAERS and similar systems is usually measured at ~40x, so that would indeed be millions.

You might think that sounds obviously wrong but it doesn't to me. I don't have an unusually large social circle and I know people who went to the hospital for specialist checkups due to vaccine injuries, and I have one close friend who really should have gone but didn't (he had a heart attack but fortunately it wasn't fatal and he seems OK now). Millions of people with hospital-visit-worthy injuries is well within the bounds of what seems possible in a big country like the USA, let alone globally.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/canada-s-vaccine-i...

Scale that up to the US population and we’d expect around 7000 people claiming vaccine injury.

Note that there is money in the program in Canada, so pretty good incentive to apply.

To say that I’m skeptical of your 170,000 number (google shows no interesting results for “vaccine injury 170,000”) would be an understatement

Edit: https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data

There is a similar program in the US, and less than 10,000 claims have been made.

The number comes from the USG database:

https://openvaers.com/

That’s entirely self-reported, and according to that there have been 30k deaths due to covid vaccine. Not sure how people are self-reporting their own death - but I strongly suspect that data has been influenced by people’s political beliefs and isn’t an accurate representation of real events.

Did you consider the obvious possibility that there are 30k deaths reported because it is not in fact self reported? Whoever told you that wasn't being honest. VAERS reports aren't even mostly self reported. Go browse through the reports. You'll discover they mostly come from medical professionals.

But even for the ones that are self-reported, so what? If someone is filling out complex forms with specific details of an injury that they think was caused by the vaccine, that is an important signal.

"I strongly suspect that data has been influenced by people’s political beliefs and isn’t an accurate representation of real events."

Absolutely correct! The vast majority of people have been told that doubting the vaccines is not allowed and will result in immediate and severe retaliation by ideological extremists, who are entirely committed to defending the public health bureaucracy. The historical underreporting factor was something like 40x but ideology and politics has surely hugely increased it now.

Obviously what you're claiming is the opposite - that for some reason huge numbers of people have been filling out bogus, untrue injury reports. It's a delusional belief. Go find evidence of that and then we'll talk.

Until then the evidence is on the side of massive under-reporting of a major tragedy by people who ideologically cannot or will not accept that The Science is made up of liars and incompetents.

If there had been 30k deaths, or 170k injuries, there would be other sources corroborating those numbers. Believing a single source of data that is easily skewed - like for example the data you’ve cited - is as you say: delusional

> that for some reason huge numbers of people have been filling out bogus, untrue injury reports. It's a delusional belief. Go find evidence of that and then we'll talk.

Evidence like the 9k people in the US seeking financial compensation for vaccine injury? You’re comfortable with the idea that less than 5% of people impacted bothered to try to get money for their suffering? 170k injuries and 30k deaths would make for some biiig class action lawsuits but those don’t seem to be showing up anywhere

It did not help that there were strong political partisan effects further corrupting this situation beyond what you have noted. I have to admit, I really wonder what the counterfactual world (where Trump got elected for a second term) would look like with respect to which groups believe which information.

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