I've consistently been called a conspiracy theorist since the whole covid story started. I got insider info and knew exactly how the timeline'd play out for years to come.
at this point a "conspiracy" is just a "spoiler alert"
I just said that:
A) Got vaccine and got infected right after second dose (1 week)
B) Noted some unvaccinated friends had no symptoms, so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect.
At this point Deus Ex was a credible prophetic game, where a "vaccine" that doesn't cure but postpones symptoms is seen as a miracle cure, which is eerily similar to "we'll need to be vaccinated every few months" that was present in media at some point. That's pretty much every pharma's wet dream.
Edit: As someone outside of USA, I find it remarkable how people seem to associate vaccine skepticism, despite pharma in US having strong motivation to push novel drugs that don't solve the issue, just treat the symptoms.
That's not the result that can be inferred from seeing unvaccinated people having no symptoms. In other words, people having no symptoms without vaccine or even having side effects from the vaccine itself does not disprove the statistic of vaccinated people having lesser symptoms on average.
And afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors.
So as Usual in studies - through data collection, statistics, and correcting for bias in cohorts.
> afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors
There's already lots of information about the details of what the fast tracking meant. I would recommend reading some to understand it better than your summary.
I just read this: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...
> The same presentation slide describes “Other benefits likely uncertain at approval and only clearer after the vaccine is used” to include the vaccine’s “long term protection,” “prevention of infection (asymptomatic cases),” and “prevention of virus transmission in the community - needs specific studies post-approval necessary to show.”
This implies they only checked it reduces symptoms in affected. Transmission prevention and long term immunity would be tested at later point.
So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated? Weren't vaccines supposed to contain its spread?
When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.
The flu vaccine also does not grant long term immunity, but it has the same utility for public health.
Since you got such a basic fact wrong, you might consider what else you've misunderstood and why. Then you can take steps to correct it.
Also you do realize you’re contradicting yourself? You’re saying nobody forced anything but if you want to live in society you must follow the rules. There were no laws forcing me, it was my desire to keep my job. My job created the mandate, not society.
Regarding your new argument, which doesn't seem to be pointing out a perceived contradiction in any interpretation I can make of it, your job created the requirement because society said it didn't want age discrimination in employment. If your employer forced only older employees to get the vaccine in order to keep its insurance costs low, there would have been lawsuits. Forcing all employees to get vaccinated has well-established legal precedent and has the benefit of reducing insurance costs slightly more.
Yea I’m not sure my job has many older people, nor would they care about their insurance costs.
Which works for some diseases. Others are only effective for shorter periods of time and/or against specific variants. The flu vaccine should be a familiar example to most people, needing periodic refreshers that are most effective against certain variants and not others.
It's also worth noting that the diseases that are treated as a "one and done" are generally those where you're unlikely to be exposed in day to day life for a variety of reasons.
Even the flu vaccine has known potential side effects
And guidance hasn’t changed because the benefits still outweighed the risks, though more studies are warranted and are in process in light of updated vaccines and mutating variants.
We didn’t wait until the studies could be completed because we had enough data.
Yes, it's unfortunate that the vaccine has side effects. But if you're seriously concerned about the risk of heart problems the vaccine is the safer bet.
The question is only: did you want higher or lower chances of survival? Cherry picking a situating you think you may have experienced and worrying about it is not useful. Attribution is hard. In single cases close to impossible.
The day I had issues I was camping. Given the testing I certainly didn’t have COVID unless the tests are wrong. No unrelated heart issues prior to this, EKGs everything prior showed normal.
I’d rather not have heart issues to help someone else feel safe. And if my chances are lower, then how come after taking the first dose and having issues, then ceasing further doses at my Drs request, how come I never got it? You see you can isolate yourself and invalidate the need for increased survival rates. Bonus, you don’t have heart issues either!
Really all this shows me is its “every man for themselves”. All anybody cares about is if they survive or if they get a hospital bed if needed. And they’ll force, or attempt to force, others to do things to give them an extra level of safety. Because of this, you’ve created a “new vaccine” antivaxer
Please double check yours. There's a few common vaccines that people assume are "life long" but actually have a recommendation for boosters when you're an adult.
But yeah, in general the length of immunity differs, some vaccines work forever, some not. It's a limitation of what we can produce.
> So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated?
Multiple reasons. Prevent many deaths, lower symptoms, make recover easier, lower emergency departments load, lower transmission, etc. None of those were going to be perfect or work independently of people's behaviours.
Most vaccines are broadly comparable to the Covid vaccines in this respect, requiring multiple doses over months or years and often not entirely blocking infection. They are not perfect at preventing infections or symptoms in all recipients. Indeed, many important vaccines are significantly less effective than the Covid vaccines. Then consider the many viral diseases (e.g. human coronaviruses) that we do not yet have any vaccine for at all: this is because making vaccines is hard, not because we aren’t trying.
Every virus and every vaccine is different, but in broad strokes the way vaccines work is by building herd immunity in the population, enough to drop the reproductive number of a virus below 1 and prevent exponential spread through the population. (Of course, they also protect people individually. But you are the only person vaccinated you end up much less protected than if everyone else also gets vaccinated.)
Covid is a particularly tricky case because (a) we were starting from limited knowledge of a novel virus and designing vaccines based on new technology, (b) this virus has mutated quickly over time, evading antibodies from vaccines and past infections, (c) this virus, especially later variants, is exceptionally contagious making it hard to drop the reproductive number of the virus below 1 by any single intervention (including vaccines, masking, mass testing, ...), (d) Covid is a very serious diseases especially for the elderly, more than an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu.
> what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated
The point was saving literally tens of millions of lives.
The confusion here is your own misunderstanding.
- previously deleted this content because it was too aggressive and condescending but adding back since another replied before I could modify -
> The other issue is that like other vaccine skeptics if you have a particular issue with mRNA (which doesn’t make sense given you don’t know anything about vaccines, or the differences between mRNA vaccines or other vaccines or even how vaccines work) you could have taken a non-mRNA vaccine.
The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.
It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.
Even more puzzling is why China and other countries haven't adopted mRNA vaccines.
Why do you find this puzzling? What countries haven’t adopted mRNA vaccines and what do you mean by “adopted”?
> The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.
And Johnson&Johnson is still available now in the US. They pulled it out of an abundance of caution and because there were other vaccines on the market. If Johnson & Johnson was the only vaccine on the market it wouldn’t have been pulled because of the risk of clotting.
-edit-
This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.
> It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.
Why would this be puzzling? Can you share some scientific resources that describe the differences in using a “whole virus” versus “part of a virus” and how that affects vaccine effectiveness? I’d like to read the same materials you did.
> This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.
There is a saying in aviation: if it hasn't been out five years you're a test pilot. How did you calculate the unknowns of using a vaccine never deployed widely in humans?
In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle.
The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.
We routinely widely deploy vaccines. The flu vaccine, vaccines for newborns and children, etc.
> In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle
Alternatively I’ve been vaccinated, and boosted twice, and maintain a health lifestyle and haven’t contracted COVID-19 that I’m aware of while living in a city, interacting with other people, and traveling. These are just anecdotes and don’t generalize. There are also people who are “perfectly healthy” who get severely ill, some people who didn’t know they had an underlying medical condition who died, and people who were otherwise healthy suffering from long COVID. I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.
“It’s ok for me to smoke cigarettes because so and so smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100”
> The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.
It seems pretty straightforward. You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID, or if you do the severity of the virus is typically not as bad as it could be, or you don’t get the vaccine and you roll the dice for no real reason.
> https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-reveal-key-differences-i...
Ok but what is puzzling about this?
mRNA vaccines? Most of the vaccines widely in use prior to 2021 were quite old.
> I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.
Are you more likely to get a disease being in contact with 500 people a day or 5?
> You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID,
In my personal circle I know two people who didn't contract covid. One was vaccinated and one was not. The sheer numbers infected make me highly skeptical it did anything at all to stop transmission. mRNA vaccines never worked in the past, but suddenly they work under an emergency situation.
I'm not aware of any study comparing the vaccine vs lower mortality of new variants. Vaccine proponents say mRNA vaccination shows lower mortality and the numbers all things being equal make it seem it does. However there are new variants. Maybe the vaccine did nothing at all, but launder billions of tax payer dollars? Maybe it's just the new variants being less deadly we have to thank? Or maybe it's a little of both.
> Ok but what is puzzling about this?
The fact they chose mRNA, never widely used and even downplayed the immunity gained by contracting covid naturally. To the point people with prior infection were fired if they refused the vaccine.
This is just flat-out wrong, and shows stunning ignorance of how clinical trials and medical research is done, which is probably why you were accused of spreading conspiracy theories.
There’s an enormous body of research demonstrating the effectiveness of vaccines minimizing symptom severity.
What. This isn't how reasoning works. "My friend wasn't wearing a seatbelt when they got in a car accident and they didn't die but this other person was wearing a seatbelt and did die, so it's not like seatbelts have a provable positive impact on collision safety."